About Jack

Jack Barratt

I write, speak and facilitate silent meditation practice. My path is simply myself—from the innate silence of my soul to however I like to naturally express myself in the world.

Though I like to say that I am comfortable sitting in one place like a stone, I find myself as a perpetual nomad in this world. An artist at heart, these books, talks and meditations are my paintings made in mid-air without aim or purpose.

I believe that we are each expressions of one consciousness which we can truly connect to in total inner silence. I also believe that, despite being innately one, we each have our own unique song to sing, and our own dance to dance in this magical play of life.

In the apparent contradiction between silence and song, between existence and non-existence, I am home. As the permanent essence of all apparently moving, changing things, I am life.

Through Fire In Naturalness

A Deep Longing for Dissolution

I would say that my path began properly as a teenager, when I began to feel a great sense of longing to lose myself completely in something or nothing. It was a desire to somehow ‘die without dying’. I didn’t particularly have any interest in physically dying but I wanted to become totally nullified as an internal, individual consciousness. Having a mind, personality and sense of individuality always felt like a terrible burden to me. Overall, I felt lost, alienated and disillusioned with my life in this world.

After suffering from prolonged depression and misery during my later teenage years, somehow a flick switched and I began to spontaneously change. I began to sort out my worldly life, and various forms of negative emotions started to peel off me like leaves naturally falling from a tree.

The Inferno of Refinement Begins

Around this time, during my twentieth year, whilst simply sitting and trying to meditate, I experienced a profound volcanic eruption of energy in my body, which completely reset my sensory system, raked tons of inner psychological garbage to the surface, and also brought about manifestations of spontaneous yogic movements as well consistent surges of tremendous heat in my abdomen, heart, head and spine.

It felt like this experience was the culmination of a massive churning that had been happening in my consciousness since my childhood. There were even earlier energetic preludes to this event, which included consistently waking up in the morning with my legs totally numb and a sense of blissful, orgasmic (yet totally non-sexual) energy present in my body from the waist down.

Whatever this explosive experience was, whether we call it kundalini awakening or whatever, from this point onwards the spiritual refinement process became automatic and natural. I lived however I felt like living and learned about existence through the inherent lessons that are embedded in life itself. What are these lessons? Mainly that everything is impermanent, and as long as we base our sense of happiness and fulfilment on changing things, then we can never be permanently at peace.

Recognising Who I Am

Through the practice of simply being aware and trying to consistently cultivate brief moments of silence within my inner space, I eventually recognised myself as life, consciousness, energy, awareness, or whatever you want to call it. From that moment on, the practice shifted from trying to be silent and aware, to simply and naturally resting in the truth—in the natural state. Awakening is definitely not the end; in fact, awakening is the moment where we are given an opportunity to become fully established as reality itself.

As all of these inner shifts were happening, the ‘inner fire’ that was awakened at 20, was my constant companion. I understood that in parallel to the metaphorical fire of awareness that burns all of our limited identifications, attachments and patterns of fragmented perception, there is also a tangible fire and heat that emerges to purify and transform the gross and subtler bodies. The activity of this fire eventually yields a state of being where there is almost no sense of gross embodiment at all, even though the body still appears and interact with others.

Being Datta

What was gained after all of these experiences? It is difficult to say. We are always life. We are always existence. We are always the flow, movement and vibration of conscious energy. The only question is about which kind of mode we would like to experience ourselves as life. I truly wanted to be free from the prison-like structure of my apparently individual mind and personality. I was willing to surrender everything to make this happen. Eventually, whatever needed to be dissolved was dissolved and I found myself again resting in the eternal abode, the heart of existence and life—Datta.

The Datta Tradition