Dwelling in the Heart of Wisdom

The Heart Sutra is a one-page sutra that condenses the greatest wisdom teachings of the Buddha into their most distilled and powerful form. It has been chanted in Buddhist temples and monasteries throughout the world for hundreds of years, and it has been used as a subject of deep meditation and contemplation as a means to evoke insight and awakening.

Adyashanti unpacks some of the most powerful teachings contained within the Heart Sutra and shows how to apply them to your spiritual practice as well as to your everyday life. The download set includes talks, guided meditation, and responses to emailed questions. 

Topics Include:

• A Philosophical vs. Experiential Understanding of the Heart Sutra
• Recognizing Our Mental Constructs of Reality
• What Is Form and Emptiness, Really?
• The Sameness and Difference between the Relative and Absolute
• How the Heart Sutra Checkmates You
• Where Emptiness Bumps into Fullness
• Experience without an Experiencer
• Egos Don’t Get Enlightened
• Reality Is Every Experience 
• Allowing Everything 
• There Is No Ego

Quotes:

“The non-dual enlightened view that the Heart Sutra is depicting is an attempt to not so much describe that view, but trying to evoke it, trying to pull it forth from out of your unconscious into your consciousness so that you realize it itself.”

“The more we look into our experience of what we are, we realize that every element that we could use to describe ourselves—a thought, a feeling, a memory, a belief, an opinion—all these things are composites. None of them actually contain a self within them at all.”

“Egos don’t realize the Self. Ever. Egos might come in afterwards and try to own it and coopt it, and claim it as their own, but egos never realize the Self.”

“Buddha nature appears just as much as unenlightened as it does enlightened.”

“Reality is just reality. It’s everywhere, all the time, at every moment. What are we grasping at?”

“The danger with some deeper realms of spiritual realization is that if we’re not careful, we can get really lopsided to the point of something being psychologically unbalanced. Because we could go so much to this absolute view that we’re basically almost in total denial of relative existence.”

“The enlightened view shows us that the extraordinary quality of eternity of the absolute is different experientially, but ultimately not separate in any way, not apart from, not other than, ordinary, everyday relative life. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.”

“Reality is in plain view. It’s not like a needle in a haystack. It’s the haystack.”

Recorded in San Jose, California on November 7, 2020.
© 2020 by Adyashanti. All rights reserved.