Happiness Beyond Thought - A Practical Guide to Awakening by Gary Weber

Happiness beyond thought: A practical guide to awakening by Gary Weber is a deeply practical, nuts and bolts book to guide practitioners on the path to enlightenment. Or more simply, an end to compulsive thinking, as the title so clearly says. Using realisations from his own life, along with meditation, breathing exercises, yoga postures and chanting, and drawing from Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism, Weber clearly points the way.

Gary Weber

Gary Weber has lead a full life, and has been a husband, father, scientist, military officer, and senior executive in industry and academia (at one stage he was a vice president in a company with over 1000 employees). But throughout his life, he felt a dissatisfaction with being trapped in the world of thought, the compulsive thinking that plagues many of us. Or all of us, but not everyone realises they are under the spell of the voice in their head. (It is believed the average person has 60,000 thoughts a day).

Coming from a Christian background, he always had a sense that everyone could reach the consciousness that Christ talked about. He spent his life searching, reading spiritual books, attending meditation retreats, doing yoga. One day, in the middle of an asana (a yoga pose) that he had done thousands of times over the years - pop - his ‘I’ thought fell away. No angels blowing horns, no internal fireworks in the mind - his seeking just stopped and it was permanent.

This radical shift in consciounsess meant that thoughts still arose - but he is no longer guided by them. There’s an awareness there, that remains untouched by mental chatter.

‘There was no one to experience anything anymore. There was only awareness. It had always been this way, but now the clouds were gone.’

Practical

What I enjoyed about this book most was how grounded it was in step-by-step methods to loosen the sense of a separate self. Using Self-enquiry, breath exercises and mantras, yoga postures and recommending a daily routine, Weber has come up with something that feels like a field manual for spiritual transformation.

Obviously he has a scientific and military background, and you can tell that by the way he approaches the whole process with clarity and precision. I mean, he backs it all with neuroscience, showing how obsessive thoughts are tied to the brains default network.

There is deep insight here, but there’s also a lot of real world application. It reminded me of another book I read by a similar minded fellow - Pouring concrete; A Zen path to the Kingdom of god by Robert Harwood.

There’s something wonderfully unpretentious about the way he writes about non-duality, like he’s been collecting data on the subject. It’s like an experiment and he’s asking - why not try it out for yourself? I’ve been doing one of the yoga sequences he describes, and have found it an interesting way to incorporate self enquiry.

Spiritual Books

I’m not as voracious reader of spirituality books as I used to be, but I still like to have one on the go. I’ve read plenty of them, but I still continue to find them both fascinating and fulfulling, especially when they resonate. And I enjoy reading about the various paths people take - everyones is differnt, we all have our own.

This isn’t so much about his journey, but more about what Weber has learnt and how it can be of use to others. I certainly found plenty of practical advice in ‘Happiness beyond thought’, a no-frills guide to finally dropping the nagging voice we all live with.

A grounded, comforting book.

172 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 2007