Waking from the Trance

Have you ever felt that your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and memories—everything you've known to be you—might be just the surface of something far more expansive? That somehow there might be a way to wake up to an entirely new revelation of the world and of yourself?

In 1977, a young psychotherapist named Stephen Wolinsky left his practice to answer these questions. His search would lead him beyond the roots of modern psychology and the contemplative traditions of the world to India's legendary sage Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

On Waking from the Trance, you are invited to learn what evolved from Wolinsky's quest: a revolutionary new understanding of the nature of consciousness that can help us to see beyond the inner structures that limit our awareness and experience the many dimensions of who we are more fully.

The Trances People Live

"I must succeed in everything I do." "I must be loved." "I must be in control." "I feel inadequate." From our earliest years, teaches Wolinsky, the nervous system creates a False Self that can trap us in a specific constellation of fears, frustrations, and psychological patterns. In this trance of the False Self, we lose contact with the greater dimensions of who we really are: what the spiritual traditions of the world have called the One Substance, God, or the Void of Undifferentiated Consciousness.

A Multi-Dimensional Aproach to Healing

Awakening from the trance of the self, says Wolinsky, begins by extending your awareness to every level of who you are: your biological instincts, your thoughts and feelings, the archetypal dimension, and ultimately who you are beyond those thoughts, emotions, memories, associations, and perceptions. But how do you begin this journey? The only way to find out who you are, taught Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, is to find out first who you are not.

Waking from the Trance offers you an opportunity to begin that life-changing investigation. Here is a full eight-hour program of compelling instruction and exercises to help you identify the frames that organize your most basic experiences, open your awareness to each of your dimensional levels, and discover who you truly are.