The Canon / Living / New Thought
Living · 1984
The Ease of Being
Foundational InfluencesThe Ease of Being gathers Klein's dialogues on the direct-path approach to Advaita, conveying his teaching through exchanges with students. Its central claim is that one's true nature is the aware presence in which all experience appears, and that this nature is to be recognized immediately rather than attained through effort.
Klein's method is distinctively somatic: through subtle body-sensing and a "yoga of listening," he guides students to dissolve the felt sense of being a separate, contracted body-mind and to abide as open, choiceless awareness. Liberation, on his account, is the recognition of what already is, not a state to be manufactured by will.
The book is a foundational influence on contemporary Western direct-path nonduality, the lineage carried forward through Francis Lucille and Rupert Spira. It also stands as a corrective to manifestation culture, pointing away from "getting" and toward recognition.
In its words
The seeker is what he is seeking, and the idea of attaining anything is only an evasion.
You are primal awareness. Life is only primal awareness. Between two thoughts or two perceptions you are.
You really live in the moment itself, because you're out of the becoming process. Everything is accomplished in the moment. You are empty of a past, of memory. Silence is love.
Acceptance puts you in a position of intelligence, of spontaneity, wherein the universe is set free.
In silent attention the mind is completely empty, so what is heard penetrates deeply.
You are consciousness, which remains during all the various states we enter and leave.
What we call spiritual illumination is simply seeing that this projected image is an illusion. In freedom from an image, from projecting any pattern, you set your surroundings free as well.
Practices it teaches
Sensing the Body as Space — Klein's yoga of the expanded body
This is Jean Klein's distinctive somatic practice — his non-postural "bodywork," rooted in the Kashmir Shaivite (tantric) yoga tradition.
Unconditioned Listening — welcoming experience without a welcomer
Unconditioned listening is the central contemplative gesture of Jean Klein (1912–1998), the French musicologist-physician who became one of the most refined Western transmitters of direct-path Advaita.
Lineage
The author
Jean KleinDirect-path Advaita; the listening body Full voice →Key terms
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