Free Awareness: The Teenage Seeker Who Gave Up Seeking

Somewhere in the first few minutes of a fifty-four-minute conversation recorded for Conscious TV, the host Renate McNay leans into the obvious question: how does a person wake up at sixteen, when most of his peers are busy with other dreams? The guest, Bentinho Massaro, was then twenty-three and already being described as one of the youngest non-duality teachers on the circuit. His answer is not a conversion story. It is a story about a teenager who tried the tools, found them hollow, and slowly learned to trust something he had never needed to build. That arc, from technique to simple presence, is the spine of the interview, and it is a useful map for anyone who has ever felt that enlightenment was a place they had to drive to.

Where did the seeking begin, and what was the spark he lost?

Massaro's account begins in childhood, with a feeling he could not yet name. He described a joy that did not depend on anything, a sense that "anything being possible" that left him with a natural confidence. He was aware of it only in a loose way, not in the precise language he uses now. Then, around twelve or thirteen, the confidence began to thin. By fifteen he noticed the loss clearly. "I lost that spark, that joy," he told McNay, and what followed was a determination to get it back. The reason he gave is the one that drives most serious seekers: the recovered state felt "much more authentic than the way I was acting," and the insecurities of high school felt like a costume.

This is worth sitting with, because it reframes the usual picture of the young spiritual seeker as an escapist. Massaro was not running from life. He was trying to return to something he already had, which is a different and more demanding project.

Why did telekinesis fail him?

Before he found the teachings that would hold him, Massaro tried the flashy route. At around fifteen or sixteen he practiced telekinesis, moving objects without touching them, for roughly half a year. He was clear that it gave him a sense that "there's something more than high school," and for a while that was enough. But after five or six months he reached a verdict that became a turning point. Even if he got better at it, he said, "it's just a funny trick, that's all." He did not bend spoons, he noted, and he could see that the practice was not getting him, or anyone, anywhere.

The lesson in that short detour is one that applies well beyond teenage experiments. Powers and techniques can be impressive and still leave the practitioner exactly where he started. Massaro's question had shifted from "what can I do?" to something deeper.

What was the pull toward the "source of life"?

His reasoning at the time was almost mathematical, and it is charming for that reason. If he could know the source of life, he figured, he would then understand everything else "in its proper context." He described an "instinctual pull" toward that source, and it led him to books, including the yoga sutras of Patanjali, which he came to through the writings he encountered. He then trained for three years on a yoga and meditation teachers' course. The training was not what he expected, and the discrepancy is where the interview gets interesting.

Massaro noticed he was more at ease, more peaceful and more joyful outside the meditation hall than on the cushion. Sitting down to follow his energy, do breathing exercises or meditate on states of mind felt, in his words, "so far-fetched" and "so contrived." What he found instead was a consistent thread running through every state. Whatever he experienced, the one having the experience was the same. He put it bluntly: "no matter what I experience it's always going to be me and me." The sense of changelessness, he says, "became felt, became visceral." It did not arrive as a dramatic break. It was, he said, "more of a subtle realization," but profound enough to unsettle him.

Why did he stop trusting the teachers?

This is the part of the story where most readers will recognize themselves. Between sixteen and eighteen, Massaro was caught between his own instinct and the confident instructions of teachers with decades of experience. Should he believe the people who promised that a certain state could be reached through purification and a long list of practices? Or should he trust the knowing he had found in himself? He describes going back and forth for a couple of years, a painful stretch in which, as he framed it, "the conflict between my confidence and my insecurity" played out, and insecurity kept looking outward for someone who knew better.

The resolution came on the road. He travelled through India for about five and a half months, met swamis and other meditation teachers, and broke off the course. His objection was not that the systems were bad. It was that he "couldn't believe in yet another system, another philosophy, another theoretical 'you have to do this, you have to do that,' because then you become something." The core of his argument is blunt and worth quoting in full: the sense that life is not thinking in terms of states of mind and purification, and that "we are superimposing all of that philosophical structure." Once he saw the superimposition, he says, he gave up believing what the teachers and books were telling him and began to "relax into my own natural presence."

"I started to relax into my own natural presence."

Bentinho Massaro, in a 2011 Conscious TV interview with Renate McNay

Does awareness need company to be real?

McNay raises a fair point. Massaro was, by any measure, unusually young to be speaking about freedom and awareness, and she asked whether he had peers who shared this natural ease. His answer was candid: not really. He did not seem bothered. The realization, he said, "is its own fulfillment, really. It's its own self-satisfaction." He acknowledged a practical, human side, a persistent sense of being misperceived or not fully understood, but he felt no real need to be understood in return. He recalled, with some humor, a period when he treated the Buddha as a kind of imaginary friend, a companion in the sense that nothing else could satisfy him in quite the same way.

For a reader, this is a useful distinction. Loneliness and solitude are different experiences, and Massaro's claim is that the sense of "I exist" carries its own completeness, even when the outer world does not mirror it back.

What does practice look like once the techniques are gone?

The most concrete thread in the interview is the shift from effort to attention. Massaro describes an assimilation period, a gradual letting go of the structures he had absorbed and the reacquisition of a conviction that was no longer shaken by insecurity. That conviction, in his telling, rests on a single observation: that one exists. "That I exist, that's really my only focus," he says, "simply noticing the existence." The practice is not about reaching a higher state, but about noticing the plain fact of being present with whatever arises.

The same note runs through his description of emotion. Rather than treating feelings as separate from the one who feels them, he points toward noticing where an emotion begins and where it goes, and staying with the awareness that holds it. What changes is not the weather of experience but the relationship to it. He admits this is subtle, and that doubt often arises for people who hear the message and then start looking for a method to do it right. His implicit answer is the simplest one available: stop doing the homework, and simply relax.

The interview also gestures at the description's own summary, which frames the whole teaching in a single sentence: unity is already the case, and separation appears only through the eyes of interpreting. The practice, in other words, is to drop the role of interpreter of one's own life and be at one with experience as it is and as it feels. It is less a doctrine to master than a quiet recognition to live into.

Why this story still matters

What makes Massaro's account compelling is not that he claims a dramatic awakening. It is that he is so precise about the journey away from the dramatic. A teenager tries telekinesis, decides it is a trick, chases the source of life through texts and courses, sees the structure he has been stacking on top of his own awareness, and walks away from it. The movement is from doing to being, from borrowed frameworks to a knowing that required no permission. Whether or not a reader accepts his conclusions, the arc itself is one of the clearest accounts of the non-dual path from a young voice.

Where to go from here

If this interview resonated, the best next step is to watch the full conversation rather than rely on any summary, including this one. The opening movement is where the origin story lives, and it is worth hearing his own cadence and hesitations. Then try the simplest experiment he describes: pause, notice that you exist, and see what happens when you stop adding a method on top. Keep the tone light. Massaro's own advice, in the spirit of the talk, is not to turn awareness into homework.