The Mystery of Being

Within each of our forms lies the existential mystery of being. Apart from one’s physical appearance, personality, gender, history, occupation, hopes and dreams, comings and goings, there lies an eerie silence, an abyss of stillness charged with an etheric presence. For all of our anxious business and obsession with triviality, we cannot completely deny this phantasmal essence at our core. Yet we do everything we can to avoid its stillness, its silence, its utter emptiness and radiant intimacy.

In this download set of the 2020 Spirit Rock Intensive (which includes talks, dialogues with the audience, and a guided meditation), Adyashanti explores how Being is that essence which disturbs our insistence on remaining in the life-numbing realm of our secret desperation. It is the itch that cannot be scratched, the whisper that will not be denied. To be, to truly be, is not a given.

Talk Topics Include:

• The Ever-Present Quiet 
• Our Everyday Storytelling
• The Indescribable Mystery
• Spiritual Indigestion
• The Intangibility of Identity
• The Ground of Potentiality
• Grasping at By-Products of Awakening
• Living on the Edge of Discovery
• The Stickiness of the Imagined Ego

Q&A Topics Include: (5-9 min responses to participant questions)

• Balancing Letting Go & Showing Up
• Responding to Collective Trauma
• Remembering Truth in States of Fear
• Waking Up from the Dream State
• Connecting Presence-to-Presence
• The Compassion Behind Outrage
• Connecting with What Matters Most
• Bringing the Meditative State into Daily Life
• Letting Go of the Meditator
• Seeing through the Self in Self-Consciousness
• Sustaining Spiritual Creative Tension 

Quotes: 

“There is a mysterious quiet at the core of our conscious experience.”

“Our egos are the part of us that’s always trying to solve the mystery of being because as long as we can solve the mystery, our ego consciousness feels like it can remain in control and be safe. But we can't really describe it, can we?”

“Even consciousness is an unimaginable mystery.”

“As soon as we stop trying to stabilize our experience of being, make it into one way, only then do we realize a deeper ground. And then the changing states of consciousness stop being a problem; we don't need to eliminate them—we don't actually want to eliminate them.”

“Letting go is the foundation for really opening the heart.”

“Anything we push against, we energize.”

“Our experience is our greatest guide.”

“If we actually followed our immediate experience, if we bring that looking back, there’s actually nothing there.”

“When our identity is no longer trapped within the self of self-consciousness, then how that self is viewed is not so important.”

“Usually if one desires awakening or peace or freedom, one thinks one must desire it because it's not part of one’s conscious experience. But actually these deep spiritual desires often arise from a fullness we're not conscious of, our true nature that we're not conscious of, but it is there nonetheless.”

Recorded at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California on September 12, 2020.
© 2020 by Adyashanti. All rights reserved.