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Praise for sincerity UncomPromised“Sincerity Uncompromised is a spiritual gem, which has the potential to become a classic in the realm of Self-discovery. Ameen’s wisdom will easily connect with the mind and heart of any genuine seeker of Truth. He is a powerful authentic teacher—wise, subtle, deep, compassionate and accessible. Seek him out.” —Mooji, spiritual teacher “This beautiful book is a must read for everybody who wants to find their inner jewel. Ameen’s way of staying in touch with his own authen-tic core in the midst of life challenges and adversity is truly inspira-tional. His journey depicts a refreshing sincerity. Other than the depth of his spiritual awakening, which blessed him with true freedom, he also describes the remarkable process of awakening to his soul-nature —a rarely described development that moved him into a life of greater peace and wholeness. This book is unique in that it simply, yet power-fully, transmits the power of standing in your own truth.” —Patricia San Pedro, four-time Emmy award winner and author of The Cancer Dancer—Healing: One Step at a Time“This book is a valuable resource to practitioners who long to explore deeper mystical realities but are committed to living their insights amidst the challenges of daily life and relationship. Not stopping at a more limited and transcendent notion of awakening, but allowing himself to be taught and informed by the challenges that his early awak-ening brought—particularly in relationship to human intimacy, Ameen inspires us to embrace both psychological and spiritual awakening together as part and parcel of a sincere and fully lived human life.” —Mariana Caplan, PhD, MFT, author of Eyes Wide Open: Culti-vating Discernment on the Spiritual Path

praise for sincerity uncompromised“Ameen’s awakening was without the guidance of a spiritual teacher or lineage or the support of a tradition. He has crafted his own original path, focused only on the path of waking up and cleaning up. Not being in any tradition, his work is free from tradition and can serve as both an introduction and as an inspiration for the growing number of practition-ers entering the Path, who are passionate about realizing their potential. The writing has a very personal, inspiring, and beautiful flow to it.” —Genpo Roshi, creator of the Big Mind Process, Abbot of Kan-zeon Inc. and author of Spitting out the Bones“What a welcome breath of fresh air! Ameen’s Sincerity Uncompro-mised is the splendid voice of a spontaneously integral and integrative life-journey and teaching. Ameen’s story and his wisdom speak directly not only, in his words, to our potential spiritual ‘freedom from life’, but also to our in many ways much more elusive ‘wholeness in life.’ This distinction, and the revelation of the ‘seamless oneness’ of these appar-ent opposites, have been the foundation of my own orientation and approach for over a quarter of a century. It’s one that to this day, truth be told, I do not feel many teachers, never mind aspirants, have really grappled with in a no-holds-barred way.The damn-the-torpedoes, unflinching experimental rigor of Ameen’s lifelong inquiry into reality… his excruciating ordeal growing up as a highly sensitive boy and young man in the aggressive macho culture of Israel… the profundity of his eventual establishment in the consciousness that transcends all phenomena… his refusal to allow that freedom to become a shield against his vulnerability, his shadows, and the coming to life of his soul-nature, or an excuse not to embrace teach-ing, business, marriage, and parenthood—this book should be required reading for serious seekers of truth. More than that, it’s a life-story and communication of whole-being common sense that anyone wanting a reliable compass for living in the 21st century would do well to take to heart.” —Saniel Bonder, Founder of Waking Down and author of Healing the Spirit/Matter Split

praise for sincerity uncompromised“I think Hans Plasqui has written a book that could and should become a classic of post-post-modern spirituality. It really gets us beyond the starting point—namely waking up. What happens when you wake up in the morning? Do you say, oh great, I woke up, end of the journey? Not at all! It is just the beginning of a new day, just as birth and rebirth are the beginning of a new story, a new life, and a new cycle. That’s why I found Sincerity Uncompro-mised so useful and inspiring because it explains in great, very interest-ing, biographical detail how waking up is a call to further development and creating our individual ego selves to be capable of dealing with and worthy of the gift of awakening. If this is not understood, we can very likely screw everything up and consider our little selves totally unique and thus super special, and start a cult or some other really annoying entity. What often happens is akin to mistaking the starting line of the race for the finish line, or, in other words, not realizing that the journey has just begun. What this book emphasizes so beautifully is that the awakened journey must include a re-examination of, and redemption of, our indi-vidual personal self so as to become a vehicle worthy of the journey of enlightened nondual consciousness. I found Sincerity Uncompromised to be written with great intelligence, exactitude, honesty, and humility. It really is inspiring!” —John Dupuy, founder of Integral Recovery and author of A Rev-olutionary Approach to the Treatment of Alcoholism“Sincerity Uncompromised is an engaging account of Erez Levitin’s path of awakening. This relevant and informative book looks at the practical implications of waking up in a modern world. Levitin’s and Plasqui’s distinction between spiritual freedom and psychological freedom is an important and insightful one. This book recognizes that spiritual development is more than just anchoring in the absolute, and advocates the value of whole-heartedly engaging life in the relative. Ameen’s story highlights the continued, evolutionary wisdom of the soul’s journey. Ameen’s teachings seem practical and accessible. This book speaks to

praise for sincerity uncompromisedthe value of shadow work and how it can enhance spiritual growth. The biographical portion of the book is captured through a unique and engaging objective account of Ameen’s journey, which is followed by an interview-style dialogue to capture his teachings. It’s a clear, easy, enjoyable, and informative read.” —Cindy Lou Golin, PhD, Leadership Coach and Integral Facilitator Faculty; teaches courses on Shadow and Integral Theory and Practice“The words ‘spirituality’, ‘enlightenment’, and ‘awakening’ have become hopelessly polluted with wrong-headed ideas, spiritual projections, guru-worship, and expectations that are so far removed from the real meaning and power of those words as to make them nearly useless. Ameen is offering a bold and brave take on how we might define a spiritual life and spiritual practice for the 21st century and beyond, one rooted in a grounded understanding of what awakening really is—and isn’t. Deep spiritual insights can change your life in ways you can’t imagine, but they are also no magic bullet. There is no escaping our humanness, our psychological shadows, our bad morning breath, or so many other things that make us such noble, and such flawed, creatures. Ameen demonstrates that awakening will take you to your knees, and is also the most ordinary and everyday thing you can ever experience. This book is must-read for anyone seriously on the path to awakening, where liberation isn’t about transcending life but about awakening inside the pull and push of the everyday. Read this and gain a much better and more accurate understanding of what the journey of awakening is really all about.” —Keith Martin Smith, Zen priest and award-winning author of A Heart Blown Open: The Life and Practice of Zen Master Jun Po Denis Kelly Roshi.

SINCERITY UNCOMPROMISEDAmeenNew Sarum PreSSuNited KiNgdom

SiNcerity uNcomPromiSedFirst published by New Sarum Press May 2021Copyright © 2021 Ameen (Erez Levitin) and Hans PlasquiCopyright © 2021 New Sarum PressCover Photo: Stanislav KutacNo part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.ISBN: 978-1-8383836-1-9 NEW SARUM PRESSwww.newsarumpress.com

This book is dedicated to you.May you find peace and happiness in this lifetime.Lots of love Ameen

Table of ContentsIntroduction .............................................................................................. iPrologue—When the Sirens Wailed ...................................................xiiiPart 1my Story of awaKeNiNg1. Isolation: My Core Dilemma............................................................12. The Army: Stronghold of the Israeli Identity ...............................153. Reveling in Being ............................................................................274. Incidents of Nothingness ...............................................................355. My First Priority .............................................................................476. The Point of No Return ..................................................................557. Post-Awakening Challenges ...........................................................658. Crystallization of the Mind ...........................................................759. Facing My Core Fear ....................................................................... 8710. Seamless Oneness ...........................................................................9711. Wholeness .....................................................................................105Photo Section ....................................................................................... 113Part 2teachiNgS1. Silence ............................................................................................1252. Discernment .................................................................................1433. Shadow ..........................................................................................1494. Crystallizing Emotions ................................................................1655. Depths of Awakening ..................................................................1836. Our Soul-Nature ........................................................................... 189Acknowledgements ............................................................... 201About the Author ...............................................................................202

INTRODUCTIONiHAVE YOU EVER WONDERED… WHETHER IT IS possible to change so profoundly that you see yourself and the world through different eyes? Whether a life of freedom, clarity and a sense of wellbeing, that far surpasses your present condi-tion, can be yours? Are you curious about what it means to wake up, in a radical way, to who you really are? If you are, then this book will surely strike a chord in you… It is an intimate sharing of the inner jour-ney of awakening into freedom, by a contemporary spiritual teacher called Ameen.If we examine our inner world up close, we will notice that we spend most of our time lost in thought. We talk to ourselves incessantly; tell-ing ourselves the same stories over and over again; as if there were some-body else in there with us, who missed out on every single thing that has been going on with us—some fictitious character that needs to be updated non-stop. We keep mulling over yesterday’s experiences, and worry about what tomorrow will have in store for us. Most of the time our thoughts are jumping around rather capriciously and randomly. We are diligently engaged in an endless inner monologue, producing a cease-less stream of words and images. In the midst of all this mental chatter, we are often taken in tow by regurgitations of shadow reactivity and emotional patterns—and they too have a way of repeating themselves ad nauseam. If we then probe a bit deeper into our interiors, and hone in on the undercurrent of all this mental-emotional restlessness, we might notice an undefined sense of subtle anxiety; a basic existential contraction we simply feel unable to release. This is the bedrock our sense of self stands on.

iiameenIf we look over the workings of our interior apparatus as a whole, we notice that it operates largely involuntarily and unconsciously—and it does so around the clock. Whatever else can be said about our inner state, its typical quality is usually not one of open attentive presence, fully relaxed into whatever is arising right now—not one of freedom, clarity and a sense of wellbeing. In the meantime, we have grown so used to this condition that its actual quality virtually passes us by unnoticed. Most of us go through life, convinced that the state of mind we live in every day is our nat-ural state. We have come to presume that it is simply our plight—an inevitable situation, intrinsic to the human experience. But how legiti-mate is this presumption really?Many of us have experienced brief glimpses of a different reality—fleet-ing moments in which the constant stream of thought, and the obtru-siveness of our emotional patterns, are brought to a sudden halt. Perhaps we have been struck by the exquisite beauty of a sunset; entered a flow state during sports; felt ourselves merge with the formidable harmonies of a Schubert string quintet; marveled at the miracle of childbirth; or perhaps, we were simply overcome by the transcendent majesty of infinite space and its countless sparkling stars, while gazing up into the night skies. In those fleeting moments, we accessed a different quality of our consciousness—a quality in which our ordinary sense of self and its endless stream of emotions, thoughts and images dropped away momentarily, making way for a more profound state of being. In response, some of us may have wondered: What do such experi-ences tell us about the actual potentials of human consciousness? Could it be possible to live from a depth of being, prior to the thick layer of our everyday existential anxiety—not just briefly touching base with it, during fleeting moments of awe, wonder and flow, but truly living from such a depth, in an enduring way?

iiisincerity uncompromisedIt is not a secret that sages, mystics and contemplatives throughout the ages have answered this question with an affirming yes. They have always insisted that if we simply pause for some time, and scrutinize our state of mind with precision and care, we too will come to find out that there is indeed such an alternative. It is possible, they maintain, to spend our lives in a much more favorable condition than the one that is presently ours. It is possible to relax our mental-emotional machinery to such a degree that the trance of our compulsive emotions is lifted, and the spell of thought is broken once and for all. And this, they say, is an extraordinary relief—as when the clouds part, after a heavy rainstorm, disclosing the radiant blue sky that was always already there anyway. When such a breakthrough occurs, our sense of being a separate entity—anxious and afraid—dissolves away. What is left has often been described as impossible to capture in words, yet has nevertheless been communicated time and again with utterances like: radical freedom, vast spaciousness, luminous clarity, imperturbable silence, and a perpet-ual sense of wellbeing. Those who have woken up to this part of their nature maintain that this is our natural state; our true condition; the one we continue to overlook, even though it is always closer to us than our own heartbeat. This book attempts to capture some of the particulars of the process of waking up to this more profound reality, as it occurred in Ameen’s case. By its very nature, the spiritual process is a subjective and greatly personal matter. Reporting on it is a challenge, because its details are often incredibly subtle, all too human, and at times deeply intimate. Yet this book withholds nothing. It is written with the intent of speaking candidly, and with nuance and vulnerability, about the del-icate intricacies of spiritual awakening. Reading Ameen’s story brings the process of waking up closer to home, and presents it as something you can relate to. Some of his struggles might very well be your own. But even if others are not, the candor and sincerity with which they are told will inspire, encourage and support you on your own journey.

ivameenThe way this book came into being was more like one of those fortunate concurrences, rather than a carefully planned out project. I first met Ameen at a New Age festival in Germany. If the ambition of this fair was to overwhelm its visitors with a wide range of competing New Age ideas and colorful paraphernalia—and instill in them a sense of spiritual indigestion—it was already successful by the time you had walked through the first aisle. Whether you were into alternative heal-ing, the spookier interpretations of quantum physics, quick-fix self-help courses, psychic powers; or into the more serious forms of spiritual practice and human potential development—anything that smacks even remotely of esotericism or spirituality was represented in the countless little stalls, spread across the multi-floor congress hall. After having wandered around a bit, curious but somewhat diso-riented, I slipped into a room that felt more sober and quiet. I learned that a satsang—spiritual discourse—was about to take place there. Given everything I had taken in by now, my expectations weren’t exactly high. As soon as everybody had settled in, a bold man in his early forties, athletically built and looking vibrant, entered the room and sat down in front of us. He radiated a silence of presence. We all sat there, waiting for satsang to start, but he remained quiet and simply kept gazing at us for long stretches of time—sometimes well past the point the average comfort zone would allow for. Yet his gaze was natural and unselfcon-scious, and had a quietening effect on my mind. After a while, I relaxed into the occasion, getting accustomed to the idea that this was going to be it for this session. Time passed. He spoke a few phrases now and then, left long gaps of silence in between, and continued to gaze upon us some more. Then it was over, and I wandered back into the hustle and bustle of this colorful festival. As I was making my way through the crowded halls once more, it became apparent to me that something about my experience was differ-ent. An intriguing shift had taken place in my awareness—as if my sense of self had expanded to encompass the whole building. Rather than

vsincerity uncompromisedfeeling as if I was wandering through the festival halls, I now felt as if somehow the whole event was occurring within me. With that, my feel-ing of being hopelessly submerged in this multitude of impressions was gone. I was no longer submerged in them; rather, they were submerged in me. There was a spaciousness, a lightness, a transparency, a serenity, and above all… a deep sense of silence. This experience, which sitting in Ameen’s company seemed to have helped facilitate, aroused my curiosity about him. He was not a quick-witted entertainer of crowds, or a clever word magician, of which there were several in this place. His impact seemed to be of a different kind. He radiated a palpable silence—a serenity that was infectious. Sitting with him seemed to have the power to draw you into your own depth.Several months passed before we met again. This time, he invited us for lunch after satsang, and I had the chance to talk with him more personally. While munching on our pizzas, I inquired about his life and inner state. His demeanor was easygoing and he had a naturalness about him. It didn’t take long before we dropped into a profound consider-ation about the nature of awakening. He was remarkably open for a first conversation and spoke with candor about the many struggles he had had to go through in his journey of waking up. What was intriguing was that, rather than emphasizing his awaken-ing into consciousness, he mainly talked about the many post-awakening challenges he had to face, before he felt that his realization of conscious-ness had truly settled in, in a deep, solid way, and had blossomed into a certain maturity. His willingness to speak openly about this delicate terrain was exciting. This first interview, which we now jokingly refer to as our “pizza-interview”, marked the beginning of a truly creative collaboration. After the pizza-interview, both of us felt we had only scratched the sur-face of a rich, profound and multidimensional subject—something too

viameeninteresting not to be deepened and teased apart further. So we decided to lock ourselves up for a week in a quiet room in Berlin, Germany—where Ameen lived at the time—and explore all the details of his inner journey. From morning till sunset we talked about all the challenges, questions, doubts, confusions, insights, breakthroughs and setbacks involved in Ameen’s process of awakening. During that first week, so much was brought to the surface that we both agreed to continue our exploration, take it further, and perhaps… even write a book about it.After several more of these wonderful weeks of joint seclusion and in-depth dialogue in Berlin, we got together in Ibiza, Spain a couple of times, and later continued our exploration in Tel-Aviv, Israel, where he often spends the winters. The transcriptions of our dialogues served as the source material of this book—and I began to work with this mate-rial, to distill Ameen’s spiritual biography from it; and transform it into a structured body of teachings.As such, this book is set up in two parts. Part one—the spiritual biogra-phy—tracks the unfolding patterns of Ameen’s process of awakening, as well as many particulars of his further maturation process after awak-ening. Part two—written in dialogue format—presents Ameen’s core teachings. It instructs us in the many ways we can support and nourish our own transformational process of both waking up into spiritual free-dom, and growing up into further human maturity. Because of Ameen’s keenness to share his understandings about life after awakening, the book as a whole is permeated with a post- awakening flavor. As such, it takes us beyond the classical account of someone’s spiritual awakening. It boldly ventures into the heart of rarely described territory: the nuts and bolts of the post-awakening world. If we look at Ameen’s journey from a bird’s-eye view, there are a sev-eral ingredients in it that make his an intriguing case—perhaps even an anomaly.What jumps out at you immediately is that he has never been a

viisincerity uncompromisedclassic spiritual seeker. In fact, he never even showed much interest in spirituality. He only wanted to be free. He didn’t draw on the guidance or support of a spiritual teacher, nor did he lean upon the nurturing con-text of a spiritual tradition. He is a stand-alone figure, who traversed the path of waking up in his own self-crafted, original way, using only his sincerity as his inner compass. This is unusual. The lack of a supportive spiritual context, more often than not, complicates the spiritual pro-cess. In Ameen’s case, however, a different dynamic was at work—a force powerful enough to bend these less than ideal conditions: his relentless passion to be free, no matter what. From his early youth in Israel, he wanted nothing more than to grow intimately close to life—a closeness so complete that it would be free from any dissociations. He wanted to be capable of living life to its full-est. To him, such a non-separate intimacy with life was what genuine freedom would taste like. Yet the stark contrast with his actual reality couldn’t be more dra-matic. Whatever he tried, a fierce sense of isolation remained present underneath it all—as if there was a gap between himself and life… and he had to close it. For a long time, all his attempts to do so seemed futile. The environment in which he grew up didn’t support his aspirations much either. In fact, the notoriously loaded cultural atmosphere of Israeli-Jewish society intensified his sense of isolation even further. During his teens he began to grasp how the dissociative tendencies in his cultural conditioning kept triggering the separative patterns of his own mind—and it began to dawn on him that he had to liberate himself from both of these impediments.Because Ameen’s early struggle was mainly about facing up to his shad-ows, and hence psychological in nature, he initially understood freedom to mean psychological freedom. He had no idea that freedom, when pursued to its fullest, could be so profound that it could result in a rad-ical shift in consciousness—a state of spiritual freedom, far surpassing the domain of psychology.

viiiameenAt the age of thirty-two he woke up as this spiritual freedom. He recognized himself to be consciousness itself; one with everything. As a result, his lifelong sense of isolation dissolved in a deeply significant way.Much to his surprise, though, he soon found out that his inner journey was far from over. In spite of the obvious profundity of his awakening, it began to dawn on him that this transition only marked the beginning of a further process—a process he came to refer to as the ‘post-awakening developments’. He realized that, even though he had recognized his non-separate nature, he hadn’t yet become it in such a way that it had saturated every part of his being. He noticed that, at times, the clarity of his awareness would momentarily be compromised by old shadow material resurfacing, and in those moments there was still—however briefly—a separation from life. He understood that so long as these shadows had not been dissolved, he wouldn’t be able to fully live his awakened nature all the time. This insight set in motion a further maturation process which Ameen calls the ‘crystallization of the mind’. During this process the mind is purified from residual shadows, reactivity and negative condi-tionings that might still be lingering in the caverns of the psyche after awakening. As this purification process forges ahead, the mind becomes more and more transparent—and the light of consciousness begins to shine through it more brightly. At some point, explains Ameen, the entire body-mind begins to take on a quality of translucence. This is the time when a deeply sub-tle part of us, that we have always intuited, but have never really fully been aware of, begins to disclose itself. It is sometimes referred to as our soul-nature, and it can be felt as a subtle energy dynamic, gently persuading you to express that delicate personal flavor that is yours and yours alone. It is your innermost unique essence—that which inspires you to bring out your latent potentials, and thereby draws you into a further completion of your life course. As such, the emergence of the soul-nature further enriches the quality of awakening.In line with his original inclination—to grow intimately close to life—

ixsincerity uncompromisedAmeen describes the gist of these post-awakening developments as a process of integrating the formless nature of consciousness with the fullness of life. In his case, this movement back down into life was marked by extremes. Right after awakening, he felt as if he couldn’t be further removed from life. He was so deeply absorbed in his own interior, relishing the radiant beauty of consciousness, that life no longer exerted even the slightest pull on him. He only wanted to merge into all that splendor—and die into his own bliss. It took the awakening of his soul-nature—and with that, the recognition of a personal destiny in life—to reverse that movement again, and reorient him back towards life. A ‘return to the market place’ as the famous Zen proverb would have it.As consciousness and life became more and more integrated, Ameen’s awakening took on a more mature quality. It had now moved well past the point of the mere recognition that his true identity was consciousness itself, free from any of its contents. It had thoroughly sank in; saturated the depths of his being; and blossomed into the extraordi-nary freedom he had always been drawn to from the very beginning—a non-separate intimacy with life. What is striking in Ameen’s case is that shadow work has played such a major role in his journey. This is somewhat unusual. In today’s spiritual culture, shadow work is often seen as an additional practice; as some-thing you do upon occasion, when some unyielding obstacle threatens to hinder the smooth flow of your life. There is good reason for this aux-iliary status. Shadow work does not, in and of itself, have the capacity to catalyze growth into higher consciousness. Reaching down into the unconscious, and re-integrating repressed energies into the self, is not the actual mechanism by which waking up occurs. Waking up requires the mechanism of self-transcendence. Still, shadow work can greatly contribute to creating a situation that is conducive for awakening. In some cases it is even a necessary prerequisite, especially when a significant amount of energy, attention

xameenand awareness is bound up in self-contraction, and only a limited amount is left for further growth. Under such circumstances the spiritual pro-cess may lack the necessary momentum to catalyze a breakthrough into self-transcendence. It risks stagnation. In such cases, shadow work becomes vitally important. It liberates this locked up energy and revitalizes the body-mind, which, in turn, makes a breakthrough into self-transcendence more likely. To some extent, it is precisely this effect of shadow work that seems to have played a significant role in Ameen’s awakening. Shadow work prepared the ground for the self-transcending impulse to come alive in him—an impulse to which he was already intensely oriented, as the silence he felt to be his deepest core. So his growth trajectory tells the story of a dynamic struggle between deepening the silence of awareness and the noisy pull of neu-roses, snatching him out of that silence again and again—until at last, all the turmoil comes to rest in the crisp clarity of a deep and imperturba-ble silence, which he recognizes to be his true self. One of the key insights in Ameen’s account is that the depth of one’s awareness—that capacity for open attentive presence with what-ever is arising—and the density of one’s shadow constellation impact one another reciprocally and profoundly. As such, this book explores in detail how shadow issues can impede the process of awakening, and how, even after waking up, they can still continue to sabotage the true promise of an awakened life. For Ameen, an awakened life is utterly free, and at the same time deeply human and profoundly sane. In the final analysis it means both spiritual freedom and human maturity. “Spiritual freedom”—Ameen says—“is the realization that your true identity is consciousness itself, rather than just the body, the mind or the soul. Human maturity is your capacity to manifest your true identity as consciousness with your body, mind and soul. It is the art of translating oneness into daily life, and manifesting

xisincerity uncompromisedtruly enlightened virtues—like goodness, truth and beauty—as much as is humanly possible.” For him, this is the bottom line of awakened living. Clearly, this is forever a work in progress. Showing up this way requires moment to moment integrity. It calls for a continuous commitment to scrutinizing oneself with the freshness of beginner’s mind—even after awakening. And such a stance, so much is clear, can only be upheld when it is rooted in unwavering sincerity… a sincerity that is uncompromised.So at its most intimate core, this is first and foremost a book about the power of sincerity. By sharing how this mysterious quality has shaped his life, Ameen hopes it will be enlivened in you too, take you in tow, and orient you towards your own true north. For where does sincerity truly come from… if not from that part of you that is already awake? What is it really… if not the voice of your inner-most nondual heart—calling you back to itself? Hans Plasqui Ghent—Belgium, 2019

113Left: “I am one-and-a-half years old.”Below: October, 1973, Ameen with family. “My father was visiting home from the front of the Yom Kippur War.”

114Left: “12 years old in my boy scout uniform. This was the exact period when I witnessed the terror attack on the bus.” (page 7.)Below left: “17 years old and terribly miserable. Locked inside my own cage.”Below right: “On first leave from army training. The worst day of my life. Within 48 hours I would make my first fake suicide attempt.”

115Top: Thailand, February, 1995. “Reveling in being. The moment was perfect. I did not look for anything more.”Above left: India, August, 1997. “Riding towards Ladakh. I felt as if I was dancing on these mountain roads.” Above right: India, August, 1997. “You can’t get any higher with a motor bike!”

116Top lef t : India, March, 1999. “With Aloka in the tree house at Morjim, Goa. The morning after waking up to pure consciousness. I wasn’t aware that my life had changed forever.”Top right: India, 1998, “Enjoying freedom in Goa.”Right: India, August, 1997. “Saying goodbye to Aloka at New Delhi airport before going to Israel to face my conditioning.”

117Top lef t: Goa, India, 2002. “My Indian yogi look.” Top right: Barcelona, Spain, 2003. “With my beloved mother.” Left: India, February, 2003. “My first public Satsang in Goa.”

118Above: “My first Satsang flyer when I still used my birth name, Erez.”

119Above: Goa, India, 2008.“With Aloka and Dhyan.” Left: Germany, 2018. “With my dear son, Dhyan.”

PA RT TWOTEACHINGS

123THE FOLLOWING DIALOGUES ARE MEANT TO dig deeper into the themes of Ameen’s biography; clarify them further, and make them practicable in your life. This part of the book presents the pillars of Ameen’s teaching and contains concrete instructions about how to cultivate silence, and prac-tice shadow work in a spiritual context. But it also explores the deep matters of spiritual life, dear to the heart of anyone dedicated to gen-uine transformation, and aspiring to live a life of freedom, truth and profundity. It delves into the nature of awakened awareness; the value of discernment on the path; the impact of shadow on the awakening process; the transformation of negative emotions; the meaning of genu-ine ego-transcendence; the value of the teacher-student relationship; the role of our soul-nature; the real power of sincerity; and more… These dialogues are based on countless hours of in-depth interviews between Ameen and Hans Plasqui, conducted over a year-long period in Germany, Israel and Spain.

1125 Silence Hans Plasqui: A key instruction that runs through your talks is to cultivate presence. Can you speak more about the nature of presence and the importance of developing it? Ameen: Sure. Presence is what you actually are. It is pure awareness, stillness. It is your true nature. This may sound a bit puzzling at first. Pure awareness, after all, is not what most of us experience ourselves to be. In our everyday lives, we usually presume ourselves to be skin- encapsulated egos—and from that perspective, our identity as pure awareness is not at all obvious to us. So, we may wonder: if pure aware-ness is really our true nature, then why is this not simply self-evident? If it is what we always already are, then why do we not experience it all the time? The answer to these questions leads us straight into the essence of our condition as human beings.If we were to take an honest look within, most of us would find that, most of the time, the actual quality of our everyday state of mind is one of restlessness. Very few of us would find an inner world of clarity, silence and presence. We spend the better part of our waking hours lost in thought. We are thinking, without being aware we are doing so. It is as if we have a voice in our heads that hardly ever quietens down. Even if there is no immediate functional need for it, our thinking persists,

126ameenalmost with the force of an addiction. Most of our thoughts are repeti-tive, random and superficial—most often not creative, original or deep. Our emotional lives, too, happen largely involuntarily, and outside of our conscious control. Emotions often take us by surprise. They sim-ply spring up because some old pain, some shadow, or some personal sensitivity has been triggered. Our emotional lives are mostly reactive, and a lot of our attention is bound up in petty concerns. So, looking within, there is no immediate sign that our true nature is silent presence. All that most of us would observe is this continuous, involuntary quality of restlessness. If we will then further explore this restlessness and trace it all the way back to its source, we find that it is nourished and kept alive by an undercurrent of undefined primal anxiety. This primal anxiety is always present at the core of each one of us. Deep down we are always vigilant, apprehensive and afraid, because we perceive ourselves to be separate entities, standing over and against some ‘other’, who may infringe upon our boundaries at any time. Ours is an anxious world of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in which we feel we have to protect ourselves non-stop—not a world in which the oneness of ‘self’ and ‘other’, prior to our anxiety, is obvious.Deep inside, we are always instinctively aware of our vulnerability as separate entities within this vast cosmic process of life and death. We apprehend the impermanent nature of our existence—our own mortality. We know that our turn will come. One day, we will die. The same cosmic process that gave birth to us will inevitably consume us. So we contract. We recoil in dread. Primal anxiety is our instinctual response to our predicament as human beings. It creates the restlessness of our everyday awareness. It produces the ceaseless grasping of our minds, compulsively latching on to thoughts, emotions, sensations and sensory perceptions in an attempt to protect ourselves and build up a sturdy identity, able to survive and function in this world. Many people succeed pretty well in creating a well-functioning ego that is not anxious and afraid all the time. They

127sincerity uncompromisedmanage to stay in a relatively comfortable state of mind most of the time.But however successful we may be at this, still that uneasy feeling of primal anxiety is always there at the core of who we are. Even when our life conditions line up perfectly, and good fortune, affluence and success smile generously upon us, deep down, that undercurrent of anxiety still persists, because we are always tacitly aware that we can lose it all. Primal anxiety is our most basic emotional environment as separate entities. It is what makes us contract from our true nature as boundless spacious consciousness into a small separate self. As such, primal anxiety is the very foundation of our sense of self. Our condition as human beings is marked by this cluster of deeply existential quandaries: our sense of separateness, our awareness of our mortality, our primal anxiety and our egoic grasping. All of them are intimately intertwined. All of them are part and parcel of one and the same knot. All of these together—and nothing less—must be seen through, transcended and released. Then it will be obvious to us that in the depths of our being, prior to our most basic existential quandaries, lies the well-kept secret of what we truly are—and always have been—pure silence, full of conscious presence.As long as the knot at the core of the human condition is still intact, we cannot access the great silence of our true nature, and we will remain perpetually distracted by lesser things. Our attention will continue to dwell on the surface layer of our everyday awareness, latching onto what is most readily in its view: to our thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and sensory observations. It will remain preoccupied with the contents of our awareness, and we will keep overlooking that we are, at heart, simply awareness itself—free from any of its contents. Hans: It is often said that one of the most effective ways to access this pure awareness is meditation. What is meditation, and how do you practice it?