The strange part is that both were happening at once. While I ran from the feeling of emptiness in my own body, everything I studied and everything I made was an attempt to understand it. In college, when people asked my major, I told them I was studying the underlying nature of all things. I thought I was being funny. I was telling the truth.
Here is what the running finally became. I rest as emptiness and I express as my transmission. When I sit with a person, I can hear the moment they leave their own truth, the way you hear a wrong note. I think in three-dimensional images, and I use them to find where someone stands on their path and what is standing in their way. These are my capacities. Not one of them is a talent. Every one of them is a wound, mastered.
The wound has a story. I was raised inside science, the son of a psychiatrist and a psychiatric nurse, in a house where the depths of the mind were dinner conversation. My junior year of high school, I discovered ceramic sculpture. I met myself for the first time. Science, art, and therapy seem like separate paths. They were one study from distinct perspectives.
At eighteen, after three months of meditation, I had my first awakening. For a month, thoughts flooded me for two hours every morning. Then, for three more months, there was no self and no wanting. Only emptiness. I had no framework for it, and no one to tell.
That same year, my best friend began to lose himself to schizophrenia. He was the kindest, gentlest soul I had ever met, and the first person I felt truly saw me. Watching him lose touch with reality broke my identity, my sense of fairness in the world, and my sense of self. Somewhere below thought, I decided his unraveling and my emptiness were the same thing. I buried the awakening so deep I lost the memory of it, and I ran for seven more years.
The running looked like ambition. A hundred hours a week in a sculpture studio. Substances. Medical school, and more substances to get through medical school. It ended the night nothing worked anymore, when nothing I took could cover the emptiness that was staring me in the face.
Then, one winter night, I was raking snow off my parents' roof in the moonlight. The snow poured off in waterfalls and threw rainbows; everything went bright and joy poured out of me. Two weeks later, I was at my first silent retreat with Adyashanti. On the second day, he said we could walk around enjoying how beautiful everything was or we could stop right where we stood and find what we were avoiding. I sat down and looked. The bliss ended on the spot. And under it was my friend, and the grief I was running from. I cried for the rest of the retreat. I had not cried in five years. My friend had seen me. Adyashanti knew what I am.
After that, I chased awakening as fast as I had run from it. Meditation for hours every day, therapy twice a week, and two hundred fifty-five days of silence across twenty-five retreats. I cried most days for three years. Jon Kabat-Zinn told me all that crying melted me into the ground. I studied consciousness in Tononi's laboratory and helped design and implement the first research study by Richard Davidson's Center for Investigating Healthy Minds on the brain changes of long-term meditators. Ironically, I was undergoing the very brain changes we were studying, and a few years later I would qualify as a "long-term meditator" based on the Center's research definition. My body also told me, against every plan I had, that I did not want to be a doctor. I fought that knowing for two months and surrendered. I did not go. I went to graduate school for contemplative psychotherapy instead.
The last awakening occurred in my first semester of graduate school. It was the night before a weekend meditation intensive with Adyashanti. I sat down on my meditation cushion and met a dense, egg-shaped contraction deep in my lower abdomen. I spontaneously embraced the contraction with love, curiosity, and earnestness. Once inside, I experienced infinite potential in a very small space, and it came as waves of immense pain and terror. Eventually the pain subsided and I was left with intense anxiety moving throughout my body. The next morning, during the first meditation of the intensive, I was a leaf floating down the eye of a tornado in my torso. As I peacefully floated, I saw that the winds of the tornado were made up of all my fear, shame, resistance, and traumas, my reasons for self-abandonment. When I reached the bottom, I completely saw through the separate self. I realized that all my suffering and attachment was caused by my avoidance of the pain of separation from the whole, and that I had used that pain as justification for my habitual self-abandonment. The self itself was created as a protective mechanism against these truths. Immediately after, I was at the microphone with Adyashanti. I told him what had happened, and he said, yes, that is the existential grasping in the gut. That was the last time I spoke to him as student to teacher.
What came next was a loss. My inner world, the vivid place I had spent years making into my home and my safety, disappeared, and I grieved it. It took months to get used to living with no filters between me and the world. It is ordinary, seamless, and present. And this is where I live.
Everything since has grown from that ground. Being a therapist has always been an extension of my abiding awakening. I helped design and build a residential program for teenage girls carrying some of the greatest suffering. In learning to help them mend a fractured self, I kept mending my own. And in that mending, I met my wife, Cate. Our love became the ground where Applied True Love was born.
Abiding awakening is not what people think. It is not the end of the wounding. It is the end of abandoning yourself when the wound arises. The old pain still comes up. I never fully believe it and I never fully abandon myself when it comes. The parts of me that never completely healed are the grit the pearl formed around. They are where the human in me and the spirit in me meet.
Underneath the story there is one wound: self-abandonment, a product of being infinite spirit taking human form. My story was striving to be accepted, running from the emptiness in the middle of my chest. The striving that caused the self-abandonment was also the way home.
It's a paradox. Paradoxes aren't meant to be resolved. They are worlds to live in, the holding creates capacity, capacity determines honesty. At the root, under the wound, is the thing I ran from all those years. Emptiness. Emptiness is not the monster. It is what we are before expression, pure potential space. The losses that surrounded our first meetings with it are what made it look like the bad guy. Meet those losses, grieve them fully, and emptiness takes on its true shape: the infinite potential that births all of life, all of existence, and all of form.
So why teach now? At forty, I was asked to become a spiritual teacher. I said the world did not need more spiritual teachers. The truth was that I was afraid. Sharon Landrith later confirmed me as a teacher in the Clear Light lineage. I was not ready to fully step into that role. I was embodying my truth, becoming a husband, a father, and a man. When Adyashanti retired and said it was time for others to step up, I stopped waiting. Needing to ripen, being afraid, playing it safe: one spectrum, and I had to master it. I was ready.
I affirm Scott as a teacher in the Clear Light lineage with great joy and confidence.
Sharon Landrith, 2020
Cate and I live in Mallorca. I teach The Theory of One and Two, an accessible guide to achieving and maintaining awakening in this lifetime, through the Liquid Armature, a three-dimensional map of my own inner world in the years just before abiding awakening.
I ran so you don't have to. And on Sundays we sit together, because this path can be lonely and it does not have to be. The group runs on donation, meets over Zoom, and asks only one thing of you: a real commitment to your own truth.