The spark and the flame

Han van den Boogaard (1956) made a trip to the Far East after completing his psychology studies in 1980. In India he visited Osho's ashram, among other places. This trip had a great influence on him.

After returning home, he began a long spiritual quest that would not end until twenty years later. In the 90s, he immersed himself primarily in the ideas of Zen. This resulted in the publication of the Zen novel Like lightning in a clear sky (1996). In the years that followed, he was particularly inspired by the life and work of Ramana Maharshi. He wrote the biography Speaking Silence – Life and Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (2004) about this. Shortly afterwards, he wrote his first article for the magazine InZicht, a magazine on non-duality of which he was editor-in-chief for ten years. Since then, he has continued to write and publish on non-duality and Zen, resulting in the publication of a number of books, including Memories of Now (2013, published in English in the same year under the title Memories of Now), Zen and the Art of Looking (2018), Looking Through God's Eyes (2020) and There is no way to where you are – the wonderful life of Alan Watts (2023). His latest book, The Spark and the Flame, was published last February.

Han van den Boogaard lives in Nijmegen, is married and has two children and two grandchildren. Since the 1980s he has worked as a freelance journalist, translator, educationalist, acupuncturist, psychology teacher and therapist at the Center for Deafblindness of the Kalorama Foundation in Beek-Ubbergen. On occasion he holds meetings in the Netherlands or Belgium.

'There is only Now. That is one of the things I saw long ago. So clear as day, never doubted it again. But it has many consequences and most people do not think through what that means: that what is concretely experienced now is the only thing. And then not so much what is experienced, but the experiencing itself. So you have to learn to see through the form that the experiencing takes. There is only experiencing, you can also call that Now. The words Here, Now, This all refer to the same thing, to the only thing that is.'