How Long is Now?: How to be Spiritually Awake in the Real World [Paperback]

First I must confess that I know Tim and regularly attend groups that he runs down in Glastonbury. At these meetings there are always people who attend who have been raised as Christians with varying degrees of fundamentalism and have found Tim's `Jesus Mysteries' series helpful. That doesn't really apply to me; during my early twenties I managed to make myself kind of a fundamentalist for Eastern philosophy and pursued the attainment of enlightenment with dogged determination. I practiced keeping my attention `in the now' at every waking moment, believing that this blissful state of consciousness was always just around the corner. As the years passed I had many interesting experiences but that final `click' moment always eluded me. Eventually I started to question my belief systems and realised that I'd taken allot of concepts on board on faith alone, this left me feeling a little bitter, probably annoyed with myself that I'd done this. I know this is not an uncommon story, there are lots of people who have thrown themselves into Eastern mysticism only to end up feeling disillusioned (not in the good way) and go on to reject the whole thing. I think Tim's new book will appeal to such people as it did to me. People who want to separate the baby from the bathwater regarding the kind of philosophy that has come out of India since the 1960's and embrace it whilst retaining their critical faculties. The sub title `How to be Spiritually Awake in the Real World' doesn't refer to some sort of meditation you can practice at work, but rather what advita philosophy looks like striped of its unrealistic idealism. The American edition is sub titled: `A Journey to Enlightenment and Beyond' which in some ways I prefer, as this is a book for anyone who wants to go beyond living with the concept of enlightenment.

'How Long is Now' is Tim Freke's best book.

It is his best book because it is absolutely grounded in the joys and stresses of modern life.

Following a profound experience of expanded consciousness as a child, the book is a riveting account of how he has devoted his life to exploring its meaning. Yet this is not a life on a mountain top, hermit's cave or monastic community, but a journey through youthful uncertainties, the challenges of earning a living, marriage, fatherhood and all the other experiences that enrich life.

It is the story of how he travels to the East to understand what happened to him. Of how in the living room of an Indian Guru he once more tastes illumined consciousness - which this time takes root. He sees that it arises from a deep awareness of the eternal 'now' which we never leave and its awesome mystery.

Returning home, he then faces the challenge of nurturing transcendent awareness in the midst of modern western culture. As the experience waxes and wanes under the stress of daily living, he is slowly brought to ever-deeper understanding of what he comes to call lucid consciousness or being deep awake.

What really brings the book to life is its semi-autobiographical nature. It is the many stories, the kind of things that happen to you and me, and how they brought him to deeper insight, that lift this book to another level. The stories earth the book in daily living, where we must all learn to nuture the deep awake state if it is to mean anything.

Above all, this is a book that celebrates life. It is a profound enlightenment teaching, yet does not present expanded consciousness as an escape from a difficult world, but as a joyful way to dive in more deeply.

This is what marks the book out as different. It is why it could be life-changing.

In `Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' Robert Pirsig refers to those who `blaze their own trail into the high country' of spiritual experience. Tim is such a one as this, and in this book he invites us to join with him on the trail. He has blazed this trail with consistency, integrity and effort for some forty years. It has not been without cost, yet he does not speak to us as a guru dispensing hard won wisdom. He invites us to come alongside and join in the journey, or, if not to join in, to get a taste of it so that we can make more informed choices about our own.

The book is essentially an autobiography, but not in any sense of following a linear time line. It sometimes reminded me of reading `The Time Traveller's Wife' where you are located at a different time, and therefore at a different point in the stories attached to linier time, at the start of each chapter. The meta-story we are following is outside time.

A great strength of this book is that Tim does not speak as having arrived, but only as one marvelling in the excitement and traumas of the journey. At one point he describes how his encounter with Ramesh Balsekar in Mumbai, and the insights he gained from it, made him feel his "journey of awakening was over", but immediately he comes in with "I soon discovered I was wrong about this..." and we go with him to another seminal moment in his experience where the view opens up onto yet another vista of life. This sense of travelling and never arriving is maintained throughout the book until we understand that it is never the destination, but only the journey that is significant. We get the distinct impression that the final insight he offers, in the section headed `the koan pops!', actually occurred while the book was being written, and we know the process will continue after it has been published.

There are two aspects to Tim's approach to spirituality which sets this book in a class of its own as far as I am concerned. The first is his use of rationality to assess his experiences and anchor the conclusions he draws from them. He has had some fairly amazing experiences which he records for us, but he leaves their meaning open. He records that in `modern spirituality' he has encountered a "disturbing amount of childlike gullibility...." which "leaves us confused and vulnerable" and "which discredits spirituality among those more rationally sophisticated." At the same time he makes good his endeavour to `try to keep an open mind on everything'. He shows us how he uses rationality to ground his spirituality without closing himself to new insights, and this is very valuable.
The second aspect is his integration of mundane human experience and spiritual experience into an `undivided garment' with which to clothe ourselves. He takes us through his experience of rejecting normal human life as at best irrelevant, and at worst destructive, to the spiritual journey, to a total acceptance of his humanity and its experiences as one with this journey. The key to this for him was the joy of human love and family life - elements conspicuously missing from much `modern spirituality'.

This unification of the material and spiritual experience of life is, it seems to me, at the cutting edge of human evolution. This book is written from that edge. For too long humanity has suffered from keeping them separate and what this book has to say about the practical business of uniting them in our conscious awareness is of paramount importance to this age.

We are left at the end with a soaring view of human evolution in progress, in which we can all take part no matter where, or in what state, we find ourselves. And we can take part in the knowledge that each one of us matters - each one eases the birth of the greater awareness which humanity will have to embrace if it is to survive in its present form, and each one reduces the suffering which is required to bring this birth about. This book enables us to choose, or not, "to be a member of the deep awake tribe that is arising on the new edge of evolution."