Toward a Greater Vision of Freedom

We are accustomed to thinking and relating to spirituality in ways that are altogether too limited and contained. We often hear spiritual awakening being described or defined as an experience or realization that has the power to change one’s whole way of experiencing oneself and life. While this is certainly true, it leaves the impression that this defines what spiritual awakening is essentially all about. But awakening is also an ongoing activity—it is what our true nature is doing and aiming at moment-to-moment. 

This ongoing activity and aim of awakening in each and every moment is what it means to actually be awake, as opposed to—and in addition to—having experienced awakening at some point in the past. The subject of this intensive will be the ongoing activity of awakening and relating to awakening as a living verb rather than limiting it to an experience that happened in the past, or even is happening in the present. Join Adyashanti to explore spiritual awakening as the ongoing activity of our true nature.

Topics Include:

• Grounding Spirituality in the Soil of Everyday Life
• A Guided Meditation on Sensing Presence
• Misconceptions about Nonduality
• A True Nondual View of the Absolute and Relative
• Abiding in Non-abiding
• The Knowingness and Unknowingness of God
• The Good beyond Good and Bad
• My Will vs. the Heart’s Will
• Relinquishing Any Position of Identification
• The Timeless and Evolving Dimensions of Reality
• Exploring Perfect Balance
• Nonattachment to Realizations
• How Your Perception Drives You

Quotes:

“It’s a transformed vision that informs a way of being. And not only informs a way of being but is a way of being—it is a way of existing.”

“If spirituality is to be authentic, it is not going to be disconnected from the realities of all of our lives—from your day-to-day life and from our collective life. Even our realization, our awakening experiences, our revelatory moments—they all, in their own way, seek to be grounded in the embodied soil of our own humanity.”

“Our true nature is synonymous with the totality of life.”

“Often what I hear being purported to be nonduality sounds extraordinarily dualistic to me. A lot of times it does sounds like it’s just a switching of allegiances of duality—from one side of duality to the other side.”

“Life is never the way you think it should be. People aren’t the way you think they should be. You aren’t often the way you think you should be. When we have this sort of concretizing or absolutizing our beliefs and opinions and judgments, then we’re always colliding with the world; we’re colliding with what is.”

“The relative and absolute are like talking about your left and your right foot. They’re part of your total body. There’s not actually this thing called relativity over here and this thing called the absolute over there and that they’re unrelated. Not only are they interrelated, but they are simultaneously different and the same. They are two ways that reality can be experienced.”

“Nothing is apart from oneself. Nothing is apart from reality.”

“I think it would be a mistake to have an idea that all this is about a perfectly balanced realization, a perfectly balanced human being, where everything is perfectly equally present and integrated. That’s an abstraction.”

“Something we need deeply is not only the good and wise response to the challenges of being, but also that inner sense of open mind, open heart—not divided in resentment, upset, anger, but something more grounded in the beautiful.”

Recorded in San Jose, California on May 30, 2020.
© 2020 by Adyashanti. All rights reserved.