“In my meditations I was visited by this light and attracted by it and it gave me greater clarity in action, thinking and feeling. My way of listening became unconditional, free from past and future. This unconditional listening brought me to a receptive alertness and as I became familiar with this alertness it became free from all expectation and volition. I felt an establishing in attention, an unfolding in fullness to awareness.

Then a complete change occurred one evening on Marine Drive in Bombay. I was watching flying birds without thought or interpretation, when I was completely taken by them and felt everything happening in myself. In this moment I knew my consciously. The next morning I knew, in facing the multiplicity of daily life, that “being” understanding was established. The self-image had completely dissolved and, freed from the conflict and interference of the I-image, all happenings belonged to being awareness, the totality. Life flowed on without the cross-currents of the ego. Psychological memory, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion, had vanished. The constant presence, that we call the Self, was free from repetition, memory judgment, comparison and appraisal. The center of my being had been spontaneously ejected from time and space into timeless stillness. In this non-state of being, the separation between “you” and “me’ vanished completely. Nothing appeared outside. All things belonged in me but I was no longer in them. There was only oneness.

I knew myself in present happening, not as a concept but as a being without localization in time and space. In this non-state there was freedom, full and objectless joy. There was pure thankfulness, thanking without an object. It was not an affective feeling but a freedom from all affectivity, a coolness close to warmth.”

Jean Klein from “The Ease of Being”

Jean Klein 1912 – 1998 was a French author, spiritual teacher and philosopher of Advaita Vedanta. He was born in Berlin and studied musicology and medicine. During WWII he worked for the French Resistance. He went to India in 1954 to study yoga and met a spiritual teacher, Panditji Rao, later returning to the west and becoming a teacher himself.

I stumbled on Jean Klein several years ago and read a few of his books. I think his background in medicine and music is an interesting combination. In particular, when he talks about meditation, attention or awareness he often describes it as deep listening (auditory). Many other teachers I have read describe this awareness in terms of sight or perception; some refer to deep feeling, touch, etc. Perhaps this is because we each have a heightened awareness in one or more of our senses that then offers a portal to this extra dimension. I recommend his book, The Ease of Being, as a great introduction to his work.