What I learned from all my years of Zen training is that the essence of spirituality is attention and intention. After all, spirituality is the practice of perceiving the spirit of things, meaning the essence or inner reality of things, whether that be one’s own essence, or the essence of life, or the essence of a teacup. They are all the same. There is also the spirit, or essence, of an action or activity. That is why in Zen they talk of “the Zen of tea drinking,” or of flower arranging, or of sweeping the porch. What they mean when they refer to “the Zen of” a particular activity is to point out the selfless, embodied, and enlightened expression of that activity. Any truly enlightened action has four characteristics: selflessness, spontaneity, clarity, and wholeness.
The practice of attention (or mindfulness as it is often referred to in spiritual...
What I learned from all my years of Zen training is that the essence of spirituality is attention and intention. After all, spirituality is the practice of perceiving the spirit of things, meaning the essence or inner reality of things, whether that be one’s own essence, or the essence of life, or the essence of a teacup. They are all the same. There is also the spirit, or essence, of an action or activity. That is why in Zen they talk of “the Zen of tea drinking,” or of flower arranging, or of sweeping the porch. What they mean when they refer to “the Zen of” a particular activity is to point out the selfless, embodied, and enlightened expression of that activity. Any truly enlightened action has four characteristics: selflessness, spontaneity, clarity, and wholeness.
The practice of attention (or mindfulness as it is often referred to in spiritual circles), is a way of redirecting attention away from the habitual focus on one’s inner narrative, and placing it instead on precisely what one is doing, on the nonconceptual nature of immediate experience and perception. Without this shift of attention—from concept to immediate experience and perception—spirituality tends to degrade into magical thinking, fantasy, and/or fanaticism. It is only by redirecting attention away from the surface level of the mind’s narrative, and towards the pure immediacy of the present, that we can break the trance of ego-identification and fall into conscious connection with our true nature. Attention is the secret elixir that one is working with in all spiritual awakening practices.
During my years as a Zen student I also learned the importance of intention. Intention has to do with what you are aiming at, and what your life-orienting values are. That is why when I first meet someone coming to me as a student, I ask them, “exactly why are you here and what do you want?” Such a direct question will often take people by surprise, which is good. When I can surprise someone a little, I know I have their attention, which is exactly what I want to elicit with such a question. Until there is great burning attention, we cannot truly begin. And when there is great attention, we then need to aim it. We need to employ intention in order to direct attention.
The intention that I am really talking about is not so much focused on what you want, but rather on what you are being inwardly called to. A spiritual journey is a calling. It is something initiated from somewhere beyond the ego, from a depth within the psyche that the ego has no access to on its own. Our spiritual journey will take as much or as little time as it needs to take. Our egos have no say in the matter at all. The ego’s part to play is to respond wholeheartedly (devotedly, even) to the calling of our true nature when it comes. And the ego must remain devoted to true nature, for if the ego tries to possess spiritual breakthroughs, or aggrandize itself with spiritual attainment, it will one day be surprised to discover that it has only ever been worshiping itself.
Our spiritual intention (that which we aim at and are devoted to) is not something that we, as egos, create. It is a calling, or instinct, that the ego receives. It is not a transactional calling where you give something expecting to get something in return. It is a calling to that which is undivided, whole, timeless, sacred, and beautiful. . . for its own sake. It is a call received by the ego, to discover and return to its source. It is also a call from our formless true nature to embody itself in, and as, the form of this very human life, as consciously as possible.
When dedicated attention and inspired intention work together as a whole, our spiritual practice will naturally acquire depth and reveal great wisdom. May our wisdom always be held in the great heart of compassion and love.
Copyright © 2021 Adyashanti.
How strange it is to look deeply into one’s true nature. We can all state with certainty, “I am.” That’s the starting point—not “I am this or that,” but simply “I am.” We have all been taught to add onto this sense of “I am” various defining characteristics and evaluations. But these are secondary at best, a collection of conditioned conclusions and evaluations, most of which were inherited from the people and the world around us; put simply, they are nonessential. The “I am” is essential to being self-conscious; it is the quintessential articulation and confession of self-consciousness itself. Everything that gets added unto this primary sense of “I am” obscures one’s essential nature.
Another way to approach the “I am” sense is to simply attend to your immediate sense of being. This is not as simple as it...
How strange it is to look deeply into one’s true nature. We can all state with certainty, “I am.” That’s the starting point—not “I am this or that,” but simply “I am.” We have all been taught to add onto this sense of “I am” various defining characteristics and evaluations. But these are secondary at best, a collection of conditioned conclusions and evaluations, most of which were inherited from the people and the world around us; put simply, they are nonessential. The “I am” is essential to being self-conscious; it is the quintessential articulation and confession of self-consciousness itself. Everything that gets added unto this primary sense of “I am” obscures one’s essential nature.
Another way to approach the “I am” sense is to simply attend to your immediate sense of being. This is not as simple as it sounds because we are so accustomed to thinking about our experience rather than simply experiencing our experience. This is exactly where good spiritual practice comes in. The essence of any good spiritual practice is to focus on direct experience rather than on what we think about the experience. To focus on the immediate sense of “I am” devoid of all interpretations and evaluations is itself a powerful spiritual practice. The immediate sense of “I am” is like being a simple conscious presence, prior to being a someone or something with a history in time. In fact, with a little practice and willingness to let go of clinging to one’s familiar identity, this simple and immediate sense of “I am” will reveal itself to be the same underlying conscious presence as all other conscious beings.
This then forms the basis of a transformed relationship with all beings, where our essential sameness becomes the ground of our relatedness with others, even as we have a newfound respect and appreciation for our human differences. The universal “I am” wears an infinite variety of masks that we human beings call our personality. But connecting with the universal “I am” in oneself and in other beings allows us to connect from a universal and essential basis, rather than from being exclusively entranced by surface appearances and conditioned reactions.
The “I am” is a doorway into the essential, the universal, and the sacred. To gain entry into that doorway requires us to step into the realm of not knowing—which is simply to say that we must unknow, or temporarily suspend, everything that we think that we know about ourselves. We must enter into a state of innocent unknowing just prior to all egocentric identification. We must not only think about doing this, or imagine doing it—we must actually do it! We must let go and not know who or what we are. Then, and only then, can we directly sense into the “I am,” the conscious presence which pervades any and all perceptions and experiences. Then we dwell as that conscious presence. The rest of the unfolding will happen by itself, in its own time. Patient persistence is the key.
Eventually, even the “I am” sense will fall away . . . and self-consciousness will dissolve into its source. But for now, let’s not define this source, for there is no substance to the source to grasp hold of. Everywhere the supreme reality is on display, but nowhere can it be grasped. Follow the “I am” to its source, to that dark light that sees but cannot be seen, and knows but cannot be known. When the eye that never sleeps awakens—yes, this is a contradiction to the intellect—the dharma wheel of enlightenment turns everywhere. This, at least, is how it feels and has always felt.
Copyright © 2021 Adyashanti.
We revere the great divine individuals, but we are terrified of being one ourselves, and so we try to copy them. Buddhists try to be Buddha, Christians try to be Christ, Muslims try to be Mohammed, and so it goes, as if by copying a divine individual we will become one. The problem is this: There’s only one Buddha, one Christ, one Mohammed, one Ramana, one Nisargadatta. There was nobody quite like them before and there will be nobody quite like them afterward. So all of the relentless effort to try to be like any divine individual is delusion in its highest.
We all have an instinct toward true individuality. This is the challenge, the instinct that is a part of everyone: “Why can’t I just be myself—freely, easily, smoothly, unselfconsciously, unapologetically?” We go along worshipping the divine individuals in some conscious or unconscious effort to copy them. But the thing...
We revere the great divine individuals, but we are terrified of being one ourselves, and so we try to copy them. Buddhists try to be Buddha, Christians try to be Christ, Muslims try to be Mohammed, and so it goes, as if by copying a divine individual we will become one. The problem is this: There’s only one Buddha, one Christ, one Mohammed, one Ramana, one Nisargadatta. There was nobody quite like them before and there will be nobody quite like them afterward. So all of the relentless effort to try to be like any divine individual is delusion in its highest.
We all have an instinct toward true individuality. This is the challenge, the instinct that is a part of everyone: “Why can’t I just be myself—freely, easily, smoothly, unselfconsciously, unapologetically?” We go along worshipping the divine individuals in some conscious or unconscious effort to copy them. But the thing that made them what they are is they didn’t have a mind to copy anybody, to be like anybody.
That’s what the symbol of Buddha under the bodhi tree really means. It means someone who was sitting down in his aloneness, not trying to be like someone or something else, but being completely true to his own yearning, his own search. It took him a long time and a lot of spiritual practice to purge hundreds of generations of conditioning out of his system so that he could finally sit under that tree. He could finally embody his aloneness, and we revere him for doing so.
What would it be like to divest yourself of this immensity of human conditioning? Some conditioning is very useful. If it wasn’t for conditioning we wouldn’t be here, and our hearts wouldn’t be beating; they’re conditioned to do so. That’s the conditioning of our biology that over millions of years has evolved so that mostly we run on automatic.
What we’re dealing with is more of a psychological conditioning, that once it gets set in your system you become afraid of your own aloneness, mostly because it’s so unimaginably unknown. Who would you be if somehow all that unnecessary psychological conditioning was to drop out of your system? It’s unimaginable, of course, until it happens. But something like that is exactly what happens to anybody who rediscovers what I’m calling divine individuality. I say “divine individuality” not to make it sound spiritual or to put it into some hierarchy, but because I don’t want to confuse it with what we often think of as individuality, which is pretty constrained.
You can wake up from your form, from your humanity, from your body and mind. You can quite literally wake up and out of all your identifications, your grasping onto form and memory, all of it right down to gender and race. It’s not because they don’t exist—they do exist—but they don’t actually define our essential being. You can have this wonderful waking up out of all of that constraint and feel the great freedom and the inherent feeling of truthfulness about it. When it happens, it’s self-confirming. So that’s one-half of awakening. That’s one kind of freedom—but you can wake up from that and still have many of the overly constraining impulses happening in the body and mind that you just woke up from.
There’s another side of awakening which isn’t just waking up from form, body, and the identifications of the mind—it’s getting that awakening down and through all of that, and that’s like a clearinghouse. That’s the difference between someone who’s had an awakening and ultimately someone who has discovered their divine individuality. It’s not just the waking up from body and mind, but awakening all through it. In order to really do that, there has to be a deep embrace of one’s aloneness. It doesn’t mean what we conventionally think of as aloneness, which is an association with loneliness. You can contemplate it in a quiet way that starts as a sort of intuition of really letting yourself embody your aloneness.
Inquiry is one of the tools we use to dislodge our rigid adherence to unnecessary beliefs, opinions, and ideas. It‘s not the belief, the opinion, or the idea itself that‘s the problem. The problem is finding an identity in the point of view and then being attached to the point of view—becoming a rock in a world that only works in fluids. Life is fluid, it‘s moving, it‘s changing. So if we didn‘t derive identity through our ideas, beliefs, opinions, and our points of view, then we would be fluid. We wouldn’t feel threatened if somebody disagreed with us.
As you see through beliefs, you start to embody your own nonseparate individuality, because we are all one. At the ground of being there’s a sameness, an interconnectedness with all beings and all life. When we sense that in life, we feel at home in the world. If we look at a tree, a cloud, the sky—you see it’s all just various forms of life, but those forms are totally unique. They’re individual without being separate from life. Their individuality, their uniqueness, doesn’t separate them; it doesn’t confer otherness upon them. It’s just what life does—it’s unique in all its expressions. That’s what you feel as the desire to be free. At first you want to be free from yourself to some extent, but there’s also the instinct to be free from within yourself.
As a teacher, I’ve never wanted to try to create copies of myself. I think one of me is plenty. I hope what we’re all doing here is to find our unity, yes, but also to find the way that unity shows up called “your life,” and to let go into that aloneness enough to find it. Because then something in you is finally deeply at home in your own skin, and as a benefit to the world, people like that tend to allow other people to be their own unique expressions of being. They don’t demand that people go around agreeing with them or being like them. It’s a gift that we can give each other.
From Adyashanti's Kanuga Retreat, 2018
© Adyashanti 2018
Spiritual seekers are some of the most superstitious people on the planet. Most people come to spiritual teachers and teachings with a host of hidden beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that they unconsciously seek to be confirmed. And if they are willing to question these beliefs, they almost always replace the old concepts with new, more spiritual ones, thinking that these new concepts are far more real than the old ones.
Even those who have had deep spiritual experiences and awakenings beyond the mind will in most cases continue to cling to superstitious ideas and beliefs in an unconscious effort to grasp for the security of the known, the accepted, or the expected. It is this grasping for security in all its inward and outward forms which limits the perspective of enlightenment and maintains an inwardly divided condition which is the cause of all suffering and confusion.
You must want to know the truth more...
Spiritual seekers are some of the most superstitious people on the planet. Most people come to spiritual teachers and teachings with a host of hidden beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that they unconsciously seek to be confirmed. And if they are willing to question these beliefs, they almost always replace the old concepts with new, more spiritual ones, thinking that these new concepts are far more real than the old ones.
Even those who have had deep spiritual experiences and awakenings beyond the mind will in most cases continue to cling to superstitious ideas and beliefs in an unconscious effort to grasp for the security of the known, the accepted, or the expected. It is this grasping for security in all its inward and outward forms which limits the perspective of enlightenment and maintains an inwardly divided condition which is the cause of all suffering and confusion.
You must want to know the truth more than you want to feel secure in order to fully awaken to the fact that you are nothing but Awakeness itself.
Shortly after I began teaching, I noticed that almost everyone coming to see me held a tremendous number of superstitious ideas and beliefs that were distorting their perceptions and limiting their scope of spiritual inquiry. What was most surprising was that in almost all cases, even those who had deep and profound experiences of spiritual awakening continued to hold onto superstitious ideas and beliefs which severally limited the depth of experience and expression of true awakening.
Over time I began to see how delicate and challenging it was for most seekers to find the courage to question any and all ideas and beliefs about the true nature of themselves, the world, others, and even enlightenment itself. In almost every person, every religion, every group, every teaching and every teacher, there are ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that are overtly or covertly not open to question. Often these unquestioned beliefs hide superstitions which are protecting something which is untrue, contradictory, or being used as justification for behavior which is a less than enlightened.
The challenge of enlightenment is not simply to glimpse the awakened condition, nor even to continually experience it, but to be and express it as yourself in the way you move in this world. In order to do this, you must come out of hiding behind any superstitious beliefs and find the courage to question everything, otherwise you will continue to hold onto superstitions which distort your perception and expression of that which is only ever awake.
© Adyashanti 1999. All rights reserved.
When you start to look at your idea of yourself, it’s all layers, like peeling all the layers of an onion until there’s no onion left. You might ask, “Will the true entity of me show up, the sterling spiritual version of me?” And at any moment that you peer beyond the layers, it’s disconcerting, because you keep finding, “The more I look for myself, the more I can’t find myself. I keep peeling through the layers looking for the core of me, and there’s no core.” In a sense, there is a core, but it’s not the core as we think of it. Because there’s still something, or more accurately, there’s still “nothing” that recognizes that there’s nothing. That recognition is consciousness.
Consciousness isn’t a thing. It’s not an entity. It’s not a little core piece of you. It’s that which sees and experiences, and...
When you start to look at your idea of yourself, it’s all layers, like peeling all the layers of an onion until there’s no onion left. You might ask, “Will the true entity of me show up, the sterling spiritual version of me?” And at any moment that you peer beyond the layers, it’s disconcerting, because you keep finding, “The more I look for myself, the more I can’t find myself. I keep peeling through the layers looking for the core of me, and there’s no core.” In a sense, there is a core, but it’s not the core as we think of it. Because there’s still something, or more accurately, there’s still “nothing” that recognizes that there’s nothing. That recognition is consciousness.
Consciousness isn’t a thing. It’s not an entity. It’s not a little core piece of you. It’s that which sees and experiences, and it makes every experience possible. It lights up the world. No consciousness, no experience of the world.
Most of ego’s problematic aspects revolve around a condensed experience of being, where it makes us feel like we are simply a separate entity. A lot of spirituality has to do with unraveling that until we see there’s nothing there. But it’s not true to just say, “There’s nothing,” because there is something. It’s not a thing though; it’s that which lights up the whole universe. We’re all utilizing it right now. It’s perfectly functioning in this moment as much as it will ever function.
The ground of being, sometimes called the Absolute, the Godhead, or Dharmakaya [the body of Truth], in and of itself is unconscious of itself. It’s aware, but it has no awareness of itself. It has no self-consciousness. In fact, we might just call it Awareness since there’s really nothing to it in a conventional sense. It’s a domain of pure infinite potentiality.
If you imagine what pure infinite potentiality would look like, it wouldn’t look like anything, because it hasn’t become anything yet. So it would be like an abyss of nothing, but not your ordinary nothing—the potentiality of all existence, like supernovas and galaxies and universes. We’re talking about a lot of potentiality, including the potentiality for human beings to develop self-consciousness.
This Absolute that’s aware, but not self-aware, uses the human being’s consciousness to become self-aware. It’s conscious, but it’s not self-conscious. It needs consciousness to light it up, so it becomes self-aware. And that’s a moment of awakening. If awakening penetrates to that depth, it’s the absolute depth of being, which you could say is the absolute totality of the psyche becoming conscious of itself: I AM.
The deepest domain of your psyche, the most unconscious domain of your psyche, needs consciousness to become self-aware—hence the spiritual impulse. It comes and gets you. Then we attach our agenda to it, like “I hope this makes me feel better, and makes my life more complete.” And that’s fine. It will use that, too. It’s understandable that we add on our human hopes not to suffer so much. But this impulse actually originates beyond the pleasure principle. It’s about something else.
The journey is actually in both directions. We need the divine, and it needs us every bit as much as we need it. It needs the consciousness. That’s basically what spirituality is: You’re making conscious the domains of human experience that are generally unconscious. That’s why you feel the pull, and you don’t know where it is coming from or where is it going. You wonder, “Why do I care about all this?” It means it’s coming from a domain of your being or your psyche that’s unconscious to you. You’re just conscious of the pull or the yearning. That yearning is not just yours; it actually originates from its completion.
So when we go into that deep domain, some dimension of consciousness comes in, and all of a sudden it’s like the lights come on. It’s awake, and when it’s awake, all the yearning ceases. The seeking ceases. The seeker ceases. It all just drops away, because it’s been satisfied. It's not so much the human that's been satisfied; that dimension of consciousness has been satisfied. Of course, then they go together. You recognize it’s all the same thing, because in that dimension, we realize that what we call the unconscious is far vaster than we think it is. The unconscious in this dimension is connected with all of existence. That’s why when you get to a sufficient depth, you experience “I am That.” And “That” means everything from a teacup to every star that you see in the sky. It’s a direct experience of being.
From Adyashanti’s Kanuga Retreat, 2018
© Adyashanti 2018
When we are paying attention, we have a natural sense of awe. We are all here on this tiny planet floating in an immense and expanding sea of time and space. We are barely a pinprick, yet we are conscious beings. As far as we can look in this space, we can see a lot of things, but we have not encountered another intelligence with abilities that are like or beyond those of humans, at least not yet.
Of all the places we could be, of all the beings we could be, it is remarkable that in a certain sense we are the eyes and ears and the contemplating ability of the universe. Consciousness gives us this unique facility, not only to be aware, but also to be aware that we are aware. We can reflect on reflecting on things, and so what is happening is that the cosmos is reflecting upon itself. When we look at incredible mystery, spiritual awakening, or revelation itself, it will show that we—in the deepest...
When we are paying attention, we have a natural sense of awe. We are all here on this tiny planet floating in an immense and expanding sea of time and space. We are barely a pinprick, yet we are conscious beings. As far as we can look in this space, we can see a lot of things, but we have not encountered another intelligence with abilities that are like or beyond those of humans, at least not yet.
Of all the places we could be, of all the beings we could be, it is remarkable that in a certain sense we are the eyes and ears and the contemplating ability of the universe. Consciousness gives us this unique facility, not only to be aware, but also to be aware that we are aware. We can reflect on reflecting on things, and so what is happening is that the cosmos is reflecting upon itself. When we look at incredible mystery, spiritual awakening, or revelation itself, it will show that we—in the deepest sense of things—are the mystery that we are looking at.
The spiritual impulse—the impulse that motivates, drives, and inspires us to awaken to the deeper nature of reality—has a human element. In other words, as human beings we want whatever we want from that realization, whether that’s happiness or love or a relief from suffering. But the real drive of awakening lies within life itself. This agenda is bigger than the human one: it is life or existence seeking to be conscious of itself and to know itself. If my talking about this ability of consciousness to recognize itself sounds a little too cosmic, you have my sympathies, but if you are quiet for a moment you will find that there is the simple sense of being—the sense of “I exist” even before you form the words “I exist.” Even before thought defines that sense of being, there is a sense of existing and a sense of knowing that you exist. That is consciousness and what consciousness makes us capable of. . . .
Part of what gives any spiritual discipline its power is our ability to look in a precise way, not in a haphazard way. What is the nature of my being? Where is this self? What is it exactly? Does it exist? If I am not a self, then what am I? These questions are not meant to have quick answers; they are meant to open your mind and open consciousness so that you can experience both mind and consciousness more directly and intimately. No matter where we look—from the biggest of the biggest to the smallest of the smallest—if we are paying attention, we cannot help but experience the awe and wonder of existence, and the awe and wonder of existence is what drives spiritual yearning. In a deeper sense, life’s inherent inclination is to become fully conscious of itself: the feeling that you have of yearning or being driven spiritually is a desire that belongs to life itself wanting to be conscious of itself—to be fully awake and fully present. This is where the spiritual impulse is derived, from a place that is even deeper than our personal concern, deeper than what we hope for or what we want from our spirituality.
In other words, there is another game being played out on a completely different scale, and that is by life itself, by this immensity seeking to become as self-aware as it can. That is your connection to the mystery, and that is the origin of cosmic curiosity, whether it is curiosity about the vast scale of the cosmos that we find ourselves in or about the vast scale of the consciousness that we are. To engage with these things is so important; it is the reason why every form of deep spirituality emphasizes the ability to pay attention, to not walk through life on automatic pilot. One of the greatest potentials of spiritual practice, if we are doing it right, is that it takes us out of automatic pilot mode. It makes us conscious and aware of what is going on, of who we are, of what we are, and of how remarkable and unfathomable this world is and our being is. Consciousness itself is amazing—how it comes to life and how there is a consciousness of anything. That there is a consciousness of consciousness is mind-boggling.
Right down to the most ordinary events in life, everything is much more extraordinary than we give it credit for. To engage with the true nature of ourselves—with the mysterious and overwhelming quality of existence—requires us to pay attention, to be present, and to not sleepwalk through the next moment and the next day and the next week and the next year. It requires us to endeavor to bring even a deeper sense of consciousness and awareness to each moment. When we do, the quality of our consciousness itself transforms our whole being.
It is an incredible experience to go outside, look up at the sky, and contemplate the overwhelmingly vast distances that make up this universe that we find ourselves part of and that we discover ourselves to be the consciousness of. When we are contemplating the universe, we are the universe contemplating itself, and that may be the most wondrous and extraordinarily profound aspect of our whole life.
From Adyashanti's book, The Most Important Thing
Published by Sounds True
© Adyashanti 2019
What is it like to live an awakened life?
While the world is trying to solve its problems and everyone around you is engaged in the same, you’re not. While everybody around you is trying to figure it out, trying to arrive, trying to “get there,” trying to be worthy, you’re not. While everyone thinks that awakening is a grand, noble, halo-enshrouded thing, for you it’s not. While everybody is running from this life right now, in this moment, to try to get there, you’re not. Where everybody has an argument with somebody else, mostly everybody else, starting with themselves, you don’t. Where everybody is so sure that happiness will come when something is different than it is now, you know that it won’t. When everybody else is looking to achieve the perfect state and hold on to it, you’re not.
When everybody around you has a whole host of ideas and...
What is it like to live an awakened life?
While the world is trying to solve its problems and everyone around you is engaged in the same, you’re not. While everybody around you is trying to figure it out, trying to arrive, trying to “get there,” trying to be worthy, you’re not. While everyone thinks that awakening is a grand, noble, halo-enshrouded thing, for you it’s not. While everybody is running from this life right now, in this moment, to try to get there, you’re not. Where everybody has an argument with somebody else, mostly everybody else, starting with themselves, you don’t. Where everybody is so sure that happiness will come when something is different than it is now, you know that it won’t. When everybody else is looking to achieve the perfect state and hold on to it, you’re not.
When everybody around you has a whole host of ideas and beliefs about a whole variety of things, you don’t. Everyone on the path is getting there; you haven’t gotten anywhere. Everyone is climbing the mountain; you’re selling hiking boots and picks at the foot in the hope that if they climb it and come back down, they may be too exhausted to do it again. When everybody else is looking to the next book, to the next teacher, to the next guru to be told what’s real, to be given the secret key to an awakened life, you’re not. You don’t have a key because there’s not a lock to put it in.
When you’re living what you are in an awakened way, being simply what you’ve always been, you’re actually very simple. You basically sit around wondering what all the fuss is about.
When everyone is sitting around saying, “I hope that happens to me,” you remember when you did that. You remember that you didn’t find a solution to that. You remember that the whole idea that there was a problem created all of that.
When you’re being what you are, when you’re living the awakened life, there’s nobody to forgive, because there’s no resentment held, no matter what.
The truth of your being doesn’t crave happiness; it couldn’t actually care less. It doesn’t crave love, not because you are so full of love, but because it just doesn’t crave love. It’s very simple. It doesn’t seek to be known, regarded highly, or understood. When you’re living what you are in an awakened way, there’s no ideal for you anymore. You’ve stepped off the entire cycle of suffering, of becoming; you’re not interested.
It’s a curious life you find yourself in. You find yourself . . . where you are. Not where I am—where you are, where you really are, where we really are. It’s a curious place to be (especially in the beginning) not to be driven by anything—pleasure or displeasure, helping or hurting, loving or hating. The only thing that will move you (and I don’t mean to be too poetic about this) is the same thing that moves a leaf hanging from a tree. It’s simply because the breeze blows that way. So you always know what to do. The breeze blows that way, and that’s the way you go. You don’t ask questions anymore. You don’t evaluate why the breeze is blowing that way because you know that you don’t know why. And you know you can’t know why. There’s never been a leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way on that day at that moment. That breeze changes the orientation of your life, moment to moment to moment, simply because that’s the way life’s moving. And when you’re living in your awakened self, you have no argument with the way it’s moving because it is the same as you are.
And you know that the breeze was always there, from the very beginning, and that it wasn’t reserved for special people. If you didn’t notice it at some point in your life, you know it was because you weren’t listening, or because you thought you had to figure something out before you could listen, or because you thought there had to be some conclusion before you could just listen so deeply, so without agenda, so without hope of a better future that you would feel the movement.
Many of you know what I’m speaking of.
Truth never explains why it’s moving that way at that moment. And if you ask, it won’t give any information. It would be like a leaf asking the wind, “Why are you moving that way right now?” The question doesn’t make any sense to the wind.
But your argument with the way the truth would move—whatever that way is—is no longer there for you. You’re no longer arguing with it. You’re no longer trying to figure it out. Mother Mary didn’t figure it out. Buddha didn’t figure it out. Ramana didn’t figure it out. None of them figured it out. They just became That. Simple. Ordinary, in the same way a leaf is ordinary.
When you’re living in your awakened being and living in an awakened way, power on any level is not an issue for you. It’s not interesting. The power to control another human being is not interesting. Intellectual power is not interesting. The power to control yourself is not interesting. The power that people want to give you is not interesting to you—not because it shouldn’t be; it’s just not. What would you want to do with it? You see that there’s nothing you want to do with it.
You realize, in the truth of your being, that you are the totality itself, but you have no interest whatsoever in doing anything with that knowledge, with using that knowledge.
Finally, you realize that you really don’t want to change anybody, not because you shouldn’t want to change them, because you just don’t. You might not want to be around everyone, but still you don’t want to change them.
None of this is an ideal—it’s the end of ideals. None of this is holiness; it’s the end of holiness. It’s the beginning of wholeness. None of this is something to achieve, because it’s not achievable. It’s simply what is in the truth of your being. It’s just what is. You can’t attain what’s naturally so. And nobody anywhere can ever tell you when or why, or to what degree you’ll let go of untruth; you will let go when you let go, usually when nothing else works.
When you’re living in the awakened way, in the awakened being that you are, you’re alone, and you’re finally comfortable with it. You’re alone, but you’re not lonely at all, because the only one who was ever supposed to meet you where you are—the only one who ever could meet you where you are one hundred percent—was you. Nobody else could ever fully meet you where you are—maybe ninety percent, maybe ninety-five. Nobody can meet you fully but you. When you finally do, then you don’t need anybody else to do it for you. Then you’re alone, more alone than you could ever imagine. And strangely—very strangely—you are more connected, more intimate, more at one with everything. More. And you would have never thought that those two could in any way be together: total aloneness and total oneness. You would have never guessed that that’s the way it would end up. But it does, and it always has.
And finally, when you’re just living in the awakened way that you really are, you’ll never form an image again of what it’s like. Even as it’s happening, you won’t form an image because you’ll know they’re all images, dust. The way it was yesterday won’t be the way it is today.
Awakened Living Intensive. Berkeley, CA. October 5, 2003
© Adyashanti 2003
Excerpted from “The Awakened Connection to Soul,” February 8-9, 2020 ~ Portland, OR.
It’s not at all uncommon that people today feel some sense of disconnection from their soul. I use “soul” in the sense of our experience of meaningful depth, something that’s vital to us, even if we don’t think of it in a religious context. It’s like a source of meaning you can’t put into words, but you can feel it—especially when you lose it. Everybody knows the experience of becoming disconnected from the source of meaning and deep connection within themselves.
We’re living in a culture where people are suffering mightily because of the loss of their soul—not only individually, but also culturally as a whole. This is a part of modern life that we haven’t come to grips with. It’s one of the things that leads us to look for some...
Excerpted from “The Awakened Connection to Soul,” February 8-9, 2020 ~ Portland, OR.
It’s not at all uncommon that people today feel some sense of disconnection from their soul. I use “soul” in the sense of our experience of meaningful depth, something that’s vital to us, even if we don’t think of it in a religious context. It’s like a source of meaning you can’t put into words, but you can feel it—especially when you lose it. Everybody knows the experience of becoming disconnected from the source of meaning and deep connection within themselves.
We’re living in a culture where people are suffering mightily because of the loss of their soul—not only individually, but also culturally as a whole. This is a part of modern life that we haven’t come to grips with. It’s one of the things that leads us to look for some deeper connection, however we define that for ourselves. It could be meaning, it could be God, it could be awakening, it could be enlightenment, it could be peace, it could be love—all these are words that point to a certain kind of connectedness and sacredness inside.
All of the external means of entertaining ourselves and connecting us don’t really take the place of this inner connectedness. There doesn’t seem to be a technological stand-in for the soul, for that source of vital being and meaning that gives one’s life a sense of significance—not just in terms of accomplishment and what we can put on a resumé, but a much deeper sense of significance. A soulful significance.
Each of you has your own experience of how sacredness feels to you and when moments of sacredness have visited you. You’ve had those experiences, as hard as they are to explain or convey. You know the sense of words like vitality, source, meaning, and soul. These are all words that attempt to convey the actual human experience of the sacred, which is quite apart from the ideas of the sacred—although ideas, images, stories, and myths can all be part of transmitting a living sense of the sacred to us.
In spiritual awakening, we experience that the source of the sacred—the suchness of the sacred—is actually essentially ourselves. When we experience the sacred, we’re experiencing something true and profound about ourselves—if we understand the word “ourselves” in the biggest possible context. As a teacher, I think one of the things that is vitally important is to attempt to give people practical means to engage in this reconnection. Sometimes I’ll talk about this reconnection in the most essential possible way. Spiritual awakening, for instance, is one version of that, such as awakening revealing that the source of the experience of the sacred is not separate from your own innate self nature or true nature. At other times I’ll talk about the experience of soul connection. Whenever you experience a living sense of sacredness or timelessness, you are connecting with the soulfulness of your true nature. Our soul connection also gives us an intuitive sense of guidance. It is the inner teacher reorienting our attention away from the surface of things to their depth. And you don’t have to be spiritually awakened to have a connection to the soul—you just need to attentively and humbly listen to your silent depth. Your presence is deeper than your relative personhood.
It’s also important to have a sense of what it means to be connected in many small ways as well as noticing when you deviate from your soul—not according to an exterior standard, but according to your own inner and intuitive standard. Holding integrity with your soul is a profound, challenging, and wonderful practice. It’s essentially an inner listening and attuning to the presence of being. It’s choosing to live in one’s depth rather than in surface and conditioned mental and emotional reactivity. This is an essentially devotional orientation; it is more of the heart than of the head.
It would be extraordinarily arrogant of me to think that I know the means of your own connection to the sacred. My suggestion is to think of soulfulness as an instinct that even transcends spirituality per se—the instinct to connect, in great awe, with the mystery of existence. When I say “connect,” I’m talking about something visceral, not something abstract.
There are tiny moments throughout the day when we move away from embracing that which gives us the most vital experience of meaning there is. Every time we don’t listen to our depth, or inner presence, we take a little step away, but we can’t actually step out of our true nature even when it feels like we have. We cannot ever lose our true nature, because we are our true nature.
One of the most challenging things is to actually get all of ourselves, for a moment, into our immediate experience of being. We can think we’re being in our experience, but we’re generally running our experience through immense filters of assumption, judgment, and belief. Most people are not having direct experience that often—they are having experience distorted through innumerable mental filters. But when you see a thought simply as a thought, it becomes just part of the scenery and your attention can orient toward the awareness of the thought. This can break the trance of reactivity and open the heart to presence and clarity—a reconnection with the soulfulness of true nature.
When you look into a mirror, there’s an irreducible presence of being, a conscious intangibility, that can’t be reduced to the old memories, identities, and personality characteristics. This is where real spirituality begins—noticing that, encountering it, not even necessarily trying to understand it—and realizing that the same thing is looking through your eyes right now. It’s like an intangible presence, and the more you connect with that, the more your soul lights up and your heart opens. It’s a very simple, direct, and powerful practice.
© Adyashanti 2020
I like to watch small things, insignificant things to most people. The way that water always takes the course of least resistance when flowing down the small mountain stream just below our house. Or how the snow which is piled high across the Sierra mountains this winter fell down one ephemeral tiny snowflake after another, not a single one knowing beforehand where it was going but none failing to find its place amongst the other trillion snowflakes that formed a white blanket across the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Or how selflessly each will dissolve into another form when the sun’s warm rays finally bring their transforming grace.
I watched a group of deer move silently through deep snow down the steep hillside foraging for scraps of food below our deck the other day. To watch a deer move is to watch the most extraordinary embodiment of awareness. Every nerve ending seems to vibrate with an intense...
I like to watch small things, insignificant things to most people. The way that water always takes the course of least resistance when flowing down the small mountain stream just below our house. Or how the snow which is piled high across the Sierra mountains this winter fell down one ephemeral tiny snowflake after another, not a single one knowing beforehand where it was going but none failing to find its place amongst the other trillion snowflakes that formed a white blanket across the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Or how selflessly each will dissolve into another form when the sun’s warm rays finally bring their transforming grace.
I watched a group of deer move silently through deep snow down the steep hillside foraging for scraps of food below our deck the other day. To watch a deer move is to watch the most extraordinary embodiment of awareness. Every nerve ending seems to vibrate with an intense sensory awareness but with no strain or excess effort. Each step is taken with such care and precision as to take one’s breath away. And each of them do it in a completely and seamlessly spontaneous way.
This is how I first got into spirituality, by immersing myself in nature and watching, watching very, very closely. When you do this for a long time something interesting begins to happen. You begin to sense and feel not only a deeper connection to the natural world but something even more subtle and alluring. You begin to intuit and feel a sort of subterranean movement in the world and within yourself. There is something, call it a sustaining generative power, a creative source, that begins to open its eyes within you. What becomes conscious is without name, it belongs to everything, and it is seen everywhere. Let’s call it the Tao.
Be very careful when looking for a definition of the Tao. We all like to have our intellectual ducks in a row but the Tao is too all-inclusive to grasp in an idea. In Zen, which arose out of a blending of the native Taoism of China with the Buddhism of India, no descriptions of reality are ultimately accepted. This is an attitude shared with both Zen and Taoism. You could say that the goal of both Taoism and Zen is to awaken to reality, but also be able to embody and express it with the whole body-mind. In these two forms of spirituality, one is not encouraged to describe reality, or one’s true nature, but to express it spontaneously. This emphasis on the ability to express and embody the Tao finds its most articulate expression in Zen, which is famous for Zen masters using all manner of actions to express the great Tao. For the Tao is not a noun, not a thing or a cosmic someone who watches over you, but rather the source and expression of all of life, including you!
I remember going in to meet with Zen teacher Kwong Roshi, with whom I did many retreats in my twenties. For a few years, every time I would see him for a private meeting I would get nervous and completely forget what I wanted to talk with him about. As I would sit nervously face-to-face in front of him, he would just stare out the small window on the side of the wall as I fumbled with my words. He would then give a few instructions for my practice and send me on my way.
One day I had a big shift. When I went in to see Kwong, I was no longer nervous at all. I did my customary full floor bows and sat directly in front of him. I immediately hit the floor hard with my hand and very loudly shouted, “Kaaaaaaa!” I then asked, “What is the true nature of this action?” Not so much as a question but as an opening salvo in our dialogue. Kwong looked at me long and hard and asked, “What is the true nature of this action?” Now we were cooking, like two kids playing with fire, tossing it back and forth to see if either one of us would get burned. I responded to his question immediately by once again hitting the floor hard and yelling, “Kaaaaaaaa!” To which Kwong responded, “Fifty percent.” And he gave me a smile. It would take me another seven years to realize the remaining fifty percent. (Sorry, I will not be explaining the other fifty percent here.)
This dialogue sounds pretty strange by conventional standards. That’s because it was a dharma dialogue, and a dharma dialogue uses words and actions to express awakened mind, not simply to describe it. The proof of an awakening’s authenticity lies in the embodied expression of it, not in the profound description of it. When I went in to see Kwong, I expressed my realization—he challenged it to see how deep and stable it was, and I responded.
The embodied activity or spirit of our dialogue was the Tao in action. And the spirit of our dialogue was charged with presence and dynamic energy. Kwong never looked out the window again during any of our subsequent meetings. Instead, I could see something in his eyes, as if he were silently saying, “I’m so glad you could finally show up here fully. I’ve been waiting for you.”
The Tao is all around us and all within us. It is not approached by grasping for it, or understanding it, but rather by aligning with the natural way of things. And what is the natural way of things?
Start here,
pay attention.
Pay attention to the natural way of things.
Watch the clouds moving across the sky,
The way water flows around things
or the way a group of deer keep watch over one another.
Watch also the rise and fall of your own breath
and how connected it is to every sense organ.
And how your insides are connected to what appears outside
and how what is outside is connected to everything inside.
When you begin to notice these things you will develop a sense and feel for the Tao.
Hold it lightly
With reverence and respect.
And Care for the Tao in all things.
Care for the Tao in all things.
© Adyashanti 2023
CURRENTS OF POSSIBILITY
A participant writes: How do you define “Acceptance of what is now,” and how does that differ from resignation to what is now? How can I get to real acceptance rather than resignation?
I am in great gratitude for what I do have and experience, but often life now seems quite flat. The more I have released, the more empty I have become. Nothing in the world seems of real interest now, yet my heart is desiring something it cannot clearly define but longs to feel.
Adyashanti: To be resigned to What Is can still be an act of resistance, in the sense of there being a sort of standoff or deadlock between you and your inner state.
Redemptive Love blooms when you as an ego let go of your resistance and your resignation, and allow room for something to arise that the ego cannot create. The key here is to completely...
CURRENTS OF POSSIBILITY
A participant writes: How do you define “Acceptance of what is now,” and how does that differ from resignation to what is now? How can I get to real acceptance rather than resignation?
I am in great gratitude for what I do have and experience, but often life now seems quite flat. The more I have released, the more empty I have become. Nothing in the world seems of real interest now, yet my heart is desiring something it cannot clearly define but longs to feel.
Adyashanti: To be resigned to What Is can still be an act of resistance, in the sense of there being a sort of standoff or deadlock between you and your inner state.
Redemptive Love blooms when you as an ego let go of your resistance and your resignation, and allow room for something to arise that the ego cannot create. The key here is to completely and absolutely let go without reservation. Only then can the divine power of Love gain access to your heart and mind. You have to completely let go of what you cannot control and utterly depend on the loving presence of Grace. This is not an act of resignation (which is of the mind); it is an act of surrender (which is of the heart).
We go through life walking in the immense darkness of unknown realities with a little flashlight in our hands, imagining that only what our little light makes visible is real. We generally see and experience only an infinitesimally small sliver of what actually exists and remain strictly within the confines of what our tiny light illumines. The true power of life does not lie within the confines of our tiny light, but in the immense darkness of unknown realities that are the greater story of our lives.
Our lives are much more immense than we know, and connected to vast currents of hidden influences and possibilities. But we must stretch out into the darkness with the full measure of our longing, and surrender to the greater unknown context of our lives in order to begin to embrace and be embraced by a Love that is awaiting our invitation. And it is not only an invitation in word but also in deed—the act of offering our Being and the fullness of our lives to the darkness of the unknown currents—eternal possibilities that we cannot control but must instead invite with heartfelt surrender.
THE TRUE CONNECTION
A participant writes: It seems that a direct connection between the spiritual teacher and the student is very helpful and necessary for guidance. Is there hope for those of us living so far away from you?
Adyashanti: The direct connection between the spiritual teacher and the student is a matter of the heart, not proximity. Think of all of those who are transformed by their connection to Christ or Krishna. The true connection happens within the human heart. When the connection is profound, it makes the transmission of the teaching infinitely easier. So focus within your own heart; there you will find great connection and ultimately the living truth that we are one and the same.
Sometimes it can be quite advantageous to not live in close proximity to your teacher because then you are thrown back again and again into your own resources and can develop your own intuitive awareness and wisdom. Many people think that the primary function of the teacher is to answer their questions and tell them what to do, but actually the teacher is a living presence that you open to. That presence is there to reveal you to yourself.
The above Q&As are excerpted from an online course with Adyashanti.
© Adyashanti 2014
(Excerpted from Falling Into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering)
The real search isn’t a search into tomorrow, or to anywhere other than now. It’s starting to look into the very nature of this moment. In order to do that, you have to “stand in your own two shoes,” as my teacher used to say. What she meant by “standing in your own two shoes” is you have to look clearly into your own experience. Stop trying to have someone else’s experience. Stop chasing freedom or happiness, or even spiritual enlightenment. Stand in your own shoes, and examine closely: What’s happening right here and right now? Is it possible to let go of trying to make anything happen? Even in this moment, there may be some suffering, there may be some unhappiness, but even if there is, is it possible to no longer push against it, to try to get rid of it, to try to get somewhere...
(Excerpted from Falling Into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering)
The real search isn’t a search into tomorrow, or to anywhere other than now. It’s starting to look into the very nature of this moment. In order to do that, you have to “stand in your own two shoes,” as my teacher used to say. What she meant by “standing in your own two shoes” is you have to look clearly into your own experience. Stop trying to have someone else’s experience. Stop chasing freedom or happiness, or even spiritual enlightenment. Stand in your own shoes, and examine closely: What’s happening right here and right now? Is it possible to let go of trying to make anything happen? Even in this moment, there may be some suffering, there may be some unhappiness, but even if there is, is it possible to no longer push against it, to try to get rid of it, to try to get somewhere else?
I understand that our instinct is to move away from what’s not comfortable, to try to get somewhere better, but as my teacher used to say, “You need to take the backward step, not the forward step.” The forward step is always moving ahead, always trying to attain what you want, whether it’s a material possession or inner peace. The forward step is very familiar: seeking and more seeking, striving and more striving, always looking for peace, always looking for happiness, looking for love. To take the backward step means to just turn around, reverse the whole process of looking for satisfaction on the outside, and look at precisely the place where you are standing. See if what you are looking for isn’t already present in your experience.
So, again, to lay the groundwork for awakening, we must first let go of struggling. You let go by acknowledging that the end of struggle is actually present in your experience now. The end of struggle is peace. Even if your ego is struggling, even if you’re trying to figure this out and “do it right,” if you really look, you might just see that struggle is happening within a greater context of peace, within an inner stillness. But if you try to make stillness happen, you’ll miss it. If you try to make peace happen, you’ll miss it. This is more like a process of recognition, giving recognition to a stillness that is naturally present.
We’re not bringing struggle to an end. We’re not trying to not struggle anymore. We’re just noticing that there is a whole other dimension to consciousness that, in this very moment, isn’t struggling, isn’t resentful, isn’t trying to get somewhere. You can literally feel it in your body. You can’t think your way to not struggling. There isn’t a three–point plan of how not to struggle. It’s really a one–point plan: Notice that the peace, this end of struggling, is actually already present.
The process is therefore one of recognition. We recognize that there is peace now, even if your mind is confused. You may see that even when you touch upon peace now, the mind is so conditioned to move away from it that it will try to argue with the basic fact of peace’s existence within you: “I can’t be at peace yet because I have to do this, or that, or this question hasn’t been answered, or that question hasn’t been answered, or so–and–so hasn’t apologized to me.” There are all sorts of ways that the egoic mind can insist that something needs to happen, something needs to change, in order for you to be at peace. But this is part of the dream of the mind. We’re all taught that something needs to change for us to experience true peace and freedom.
Just imagine for a moment that this isn’t true. Even though you may believe that it’s true, just imagine for a moment: What would it be like if you didn’t need to struggle, if you didn’t need to make an effort to find peace and happiness? What would that feel like now? And just take a moment to be quiet and see if peace or stillness is with you in this moment.
© Adyashanti and Sounds True 2010
Many seekers do not take full responsibility for their own liberation, but wait for one big, final spiritual experience which will catapult them fully into it. It is this search for the final liberating experience which gives rise to a rampant form of spiritual consumerism in which seekers go from one teacher to another, shopping for enlightenment as if shopping for sweets in a candy store. This spiritual promiscuity is rapidly turning the search for enlightenment into a cult of experience seekers. And, while many people indeed have powerful experiences, in most cases these do not lead to the profound transformation of the individual, which is the expression of enlightenment.
Many seekers do not take full responsibility for their own liberation, but wait for one big, final spiritual experience which will catapult them fully into it. It is this search for the final liberating experience which gives rise to a rampant form of spiritual consumerism in which seekers go from one teacher to another, shopping for enlightenment as if shopping for sweets in a candy store. This spiritual promiscuity is rapidly turning the search for enlightenment into a cult of experience seekers. And, while many people indeed have powerful experiences, in most cases these do not lead to the profound transformation of the individual, which is the expression of enlightenment.
In speaking regularly with spiritual seekers, it dawned on me one day how addicted so many of them are to the power of charisma. They swap stories about how powerful this or that teacher is and compare experiences. They get a charge from it, many mistaking charisma for enlightenment. Charisma attracts at all levels: political, sexual, spiritual, etc., and it feeds the ego's desire to feel special. The ego loves getting hits of power—it's like a form of spiritual candy. The candy may be sweet but can you live on it? Does it make you free?
Freedom is not necessarily exciting; it's just free. Very peaceful and quiet, so very quiet. Of course, it is also filled with joy and wonder, but it is not what you imagine. It is much, much less. Many mistake the intoxicating power of otherworldly charisma for enlightenment. More often than not it is simply otherworldly, and not necessarily free or enlightened. In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Because if feeling good is your goal, then as soon as you feel better you will lose interest in what is true. This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow. It simply means that if this desire to feel good is stronger than the yearning to see, know, and experience Truth, then this desire will always be distorting the perception of what is Real, while corrupting one's deepest integrity.
In my experience, everyone will say they want to discover the Truth, right up until they realize that the Truth will rob them of their deepest held ideas, beliefs, hopes, and dreams. The freedom of enlightenment means much more than the experience of love and peace. It means discovering a Truth that will turn your view of self and life upside-down. For one who is truly ready, this will be unimaginably liberating. But for one who is still clinging in any way, this will be extremely challenging indeed. How does one know if they are ready? One is ready when they are willing to be absolutely consumed, when they are willing to be fuel for a fire without end.
If you start playing the game of being an "enlightened somebody," the true teacher is going to call you on it. He or she is going to expose you, and that exposure is going to hurt. Because the ego will be there, standing in the light of Truth, exposed and humiliated. Of course, the ego will cry "foul!" It will claim that the teacher made a mistake and begin to justify itself in an effort to put its protective clothing back on. It will begin to spin justifications with incredible subtlety and deceptiveness. This is where real spiritual sadhana (practice) begins. This is where it all becomes very real and the student discovers whether he or she truly wants to be free, or merely wants to remain as a false, separate, and self-justifying ego. This crossroad inevitably comes and is always challenging. It separates the true seeker from the false one. The true seeker will be willing to bare the grace of humility, whereas the false seeker will run from it. Thus begins the true path to enlightenment, granted only to those willing to be nobody. Discovering your "nobodyness" opens the door to awakening as beingness, and beyond that to the Source of all beingness.
Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special—it's not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe.
The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time—not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.
Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is. This movement of grasping and aversion gives rise to a sense of a separate "me," and in turn the sense of "me" strengthens itself this way. It is this continuous loop of causation that tricks consciousness into a trance of identification. Identification with what? Identification with the continuous loop of suffering. After all, who is suffering? The "me" is suffering. And who is this me? It is nothing more than a sense of self caused by identification with grasping and aversion. You see, it's all a creation of the mind, an endless movie, a terrible dream. Don't try to change the dream, because trying to change it is just another movement in the dream. Look at the dream. Be aware of the dream. That awareness is It. Become more interested in the awareness of the dream than in the dream itself. What is that awareness? Who is that awareness? Don't go spouting out an answer, just be the answer. Be It.
Enlightenment means the end of all division. It is not simply having an occasional experience of unity beyond all division, it is actually being undivided. This is what nonduality truly means. It means there is just one Self, without a difference or gap between the profound revelation of Oneness and the way it is perceived and lived every moment of life. Nonduality means that the inner revelation and the outer expression of the personality are one and the same. So few seem to be interested in the greater implication contained within profound spiritual experiences, because it is the contemplation of these implications which quickly brings to awareness the inner divisions existing within most seekers.
Spiritual people can be some of the most violent people you will ever meet. Mostly, they are violent to themselves. They violently try to control their minds, their emotions, and their bodies. They become upset with themselves and beat themselves up for not rising up to the conditioned mind's idea of what it believes enlightenment to be. No one ever became free through such violence. Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads. They try to concentrate their way to heaven. But Freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and unselfconscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of a someone who is in control is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.
There is nothing more insidiously destructive to the attainment of liberation than self-doubt and cynicism. Doubt is a movement of the conditioned mind that always claims that “It's not possible,” that “Freedom is not possible for me.” Doubt always knows; it "knows" that nothing is possible. And in this knowing, doubt robs you of the possibility of anything truly new or transformative from happening. Furthermore, doubt is always accompanied by a pervasive cynicism that unconsciously puts a negative spin on whatever it touches. Cynicism is a world view which protects the ego from scrutiny by maintaining a negative stance in relationship to what it does not know, does not want to know, or cannot know. Many spiritual seekers have no idea how cynical and doubt-laden they actually are. It is this blindness and denial of the presence of doubt and cynicism that makes the birth of a profound trust impossible, a trust without which final liberation will always remain simply a dream.
All fear comes from thought in the form of memory (past) or projection (future). Thought creates time: past, present, and future. So fear exists and comes from the perceived existence of time. To be free of fear is to be free of time. Since time is a creation of thought, to be free of fear you must be free of thought. Consequently, it is important to awaken and experience your Self outside of thought, existing as eternity. So question all notions of yourself that are creations of thought and of time—of past, present, and future. Experience your eternalness, your holiness, your awakeness until you are convinced that you are never subject to the movement of thought, of fear, or of time. To be free of fear is to be full of Love.
Many spiritual seekers get "stuck in emptiness,” in the absolute, in transcendence. They cling to bliss, or peace, or indifference. When the self-centered motivation for living disappears, many seekers become indifferent. They see the perfection of all existence and find no reason for doing anything, including caring for themselves or others. I call this "taking a false refuge." It is a very subtle egoic trap; it's a fixation in the absolute and all unconscious form of attachment that masquerades as liberation. It can be very difficult to wake someone up from this deceptive fixation because they literally have no motivation to let go of it. Stuck in a form of divine indifference, such people believe they have reached the top of the mountain when actually they are hiding out halfway up its slope.
Enlightenment does not mean one should disappear into the realm of transcendence. To be fixated in the absolute is simply the polar opposite of being fixated in the relative. With the dawning of true enlightenment, there is a tremendous birthing of impersonal Love and wisdom that never fixates in any realm of experience. To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true nonduality. If emptiness cannot dance, it is not true emptiness. If moonlight does not flood the empty night sky and reflect in every drop of water, on every blade of grass, then you are only looking at your own empty dream. I say, “Wake up!” Then your heart will be flooded with a Love that you cannot contain.
Maybe I can point you to the great Reality within you. Maybe you will awaken to the direct experience of Self-realization. Maybe you will catch the fire of transmission. But there is one thing that no one can give you: the honesty and integrity that alone will bring you completely to the other shore. No one can give you the strength of character necessary for profound spiritual experience to become the catalyst for the evolutionary transformation called "enlightenment." Only you can find that passion within that burns with an integrity that will not settle for anything less than the Truth.
Enlightenment has nothing to do with states of consciousness. Whether you are in ego consciousness or unity consciousness is not really the point. I have met many people who have easy access to advanced states of consciousness. Though for some people this may come very easily, I also notice that many of these people are no freer than anyone else. If you don't believe that the ego can exist in very advanced states of consciousness, think again. The point isn't the state of consciousness, even very advanced ones, but an awake mystery that is the source of all states of consciousness. It is even the source of presence and beingness. It is beyond all perception and all experience. I call it "awakeness." To find out that you are empty of emptiness is to die into an aware mystery, which is the source of all existence. It just so happens that that mystery is in love with all of its manifestation and non-manifestation. You find your Self by stepping back out of yourself.
Ramana Maharshi's gift to the world was not that he realized the Self. Many people have had a deep realization of the Self. Ramana's real gift was that he embodied that realization so thoroughly. It is one thing to realize the Self; it is something else altogether to embody that realization to the extent that there is no gap between inner revelation and its outer expression. Many have glimpsed the realization of Oneness; few consistently express that realization through their humanness. It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.
First published in the Inner Directions Journal, Fall/Winter 1999.
© 1999 Adyashanti.
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