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The journey to enlightenment is unique because it starts not by taking a step forward, but by taking a step backwards. A step forward toward our goal is the usual trajectory of nearly every form of seeking we undertake. And therefore, it feels quite natural and obvious to us that all of our seeking necessitates some form of forward progress towards our goal. This is exactly where our first mistake on the spiritual path is usually made. For the unified perspective of enlightenment lies not outside of us, nor does it exist somewhere inside of us. Rather, it comes into being at the exact point, the inception point, where we come into being, moment to moment. Meaning that enlightenment is not something that we have lost, misplaced, or been seduced away from. Rather, it is a perspective (the unified view) that spontaneously comes into being when all seeking comes to an end, if only for a moment, and we are left nakedly open to the universe, as the universe, as if we had been turned inside out.

Here is the great paradox of the journey to enlightenment: seek it, and you will surely miss it; don’t seek it, and you will be lost altogether.

So what exactly are we to do if we have a sincere desire to awaken to the unified view? Meditation, inquiry, and silence are the backbone of my teachings, but what I’m getting at here is something altogether more subtle. In this article, I’m not exploring what to practice (I’ve written many books on that), but rather how we approach our spiritual practice psychologically. Working with students for many years has shown me just how important our inner motivations are, and how we apply them to our spiritual practice. So the first step of the journey to enlightenment begins with clarity of intent. Simply put, this means: why are you doing this, and what do you hope to get out of it?

These sound like pretty straightforward questions. But once you begin to deeply contemplate them, you will most likely find many layers of motivation, or even conflicting motivations. And by working your way down the thread of your motivations—one motivation opening a doorway to yet another, and often a deeper or more intimate one—you finally arrive at exactly what your most fundamental drive towards enlightenment is. And when you do, it will not only be your motivation. Most fundamentally, it will be the motivation of the enlightened view (your true nature) itself, seeking to wake itself up for the sake of itself.

My view is that our true nature, not the ego, is the origin of the enlightenment instinct. Our ego mostly misinterprets the enlightenment instinct and overlays it with its own agendas. This is to be expected, because the ego seeks its own peace and happiness, and rightly so. Life can be a very tough ride sometimes.

The ego can find much healing on a good spiritual path as a fringe benefit to doing deep spiritual practice. But the path to enlightenment is a path dedicated to spirit (or true nature) right from the beginning. It is a path motivated by the spirit and for the spirit. In this sense, it is a very narrow path, not because it excludes anyone, but because it is not very enticing to most people. I say this because the search for enlightenment, even the authentic desire for it, is not what most people get into spirituality or religion for. I mean, how many people really want to see through all their beliefs, have their faith shaken to the core, whatever it may be, and then take a swan dive into the inner void as the ego experiences its own demise? This is absolutely not what most get into spirituality for. And this is completely understandable.

What is very hard to understand from the ego’s point of view is the impulse, the drive, the instinct toward enlightenment. I don’t mean the sales pitch for enlightenment, which often sounds to me like little more than an egocentric wish list dressed up in spiritual clothing, but rather, the spirit’s instinct to awaken itself for the sake of itself. This is the spiritual instinct for enlightenment in its naked simplicity; and it can be quite unnerving to our ego when it realizes that the spiritual instinct arises from somewhere other than itself, and leads to somewhere quite unknown. An unknown felt by intuition to be something of immense and startling importance. An unknown that truly justifies the word sacred.

And so we come full circle, arriving exactly where we began, where everything always begins. The journey to enlightenment isn’t about going from here to there, it’s about becoming more and more conscious until consciousness is all that’s left. It’s a journey from here to here, but you gotta make it anyway, if you want to be spiritually awake.

It is important when we consider the subject of relationship that we not limit our consideration only to relationship between human beings, but broaden it to include our relationship to the whole of life. From the ego’s limited point of view, relationship is always between objects—between a personal “me” and something other than me. It is from this limited point of view that most human beings begin their consideration of what enlightened relationship is. However, in order to find out what enlightened relationship is, it is imperative that the ego’s reality as a separate entity be questioned. Because as long as we perceive our self to be a separate ego, enlightened relationship to others and to life as a whole will remain impossibilities.

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Q: When I think of what my relationship is with life, I find I want to avoid daily challenges. My hope is that when I become enlightened, life will be easier for me.
A:  If you want to be free, you cannot hide from anything. Many spiritual seekers are using spiritual practices as a means to avoid many aspects of themselves. The problem with this is that as long as you are avoiding anything, you are not living in Truth. You are avoiding Truth. No one ever became enlightened by avoiding Truth.

If you want to be free, then you must face yourself and face your life as it is. Do not use spirituality or spiritual experience as something to hide behind. As long as you are avoiding parts of yourself, or life in general, then even very profound spiritual experiences and revelations will have very little permanent effect on you. Do not simply seek to transcend life, but realize that you are all of life. You are Life itself.

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Q: What is the right relationship to have with spiritual experiences?
A:  What’s important about spiritual experiences is how you relate to them. Two people can relate very differently to the same experience. One can be set free as a result of a profound spiritual experience, while another will cling to old habits of conditioning, attachment, and ego. Everything depends upon your readiness and willingness to let go into the Unknown, and live from that mysterious and precious condition. The question is: Are you ready to give up everything when God comes knocking at your door? This willingness to completely let go and surrender to the divine determines how free you will ultimately become. Whatever you hold back for yourself will become your prison. My advice is to give your whole heart, mind, body, and soul to grace when it comes. Ask yourself now: Am I ready?

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If one is to be truly free, then one must truly want to be free of all attachments, aversions, and dependencies upon others to meet their emotional and psychological needs. This is challenging indeed to many seekers.

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Relationship based on Truth, which means a relationship that is free of dependency and demands, is a relationship centered upon celebration. It’s a mutual coming together for no other reason than being together.

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Deeply inquiring into the question “Who is another?” can lead to the direct experience that the other is one’s own Self—that in fact, there is no other. However, I have seen that for most seekers, even this experiential revelation is not enough to transform the painfully personal ways that they relate.

To come to this profound transformation requires a very deep investigation of the implications inherent in the experiential revelation that there is no other. It is in the daily living of these implications that most seekers fail. Why? Because, fundamentally, most people want to remain separate and in control. Simply put, most people want to keep dreaming that they are special, unique, and separate. They want to remain separate more than they want to wake up to the perfect unity of an Unknown which leaves no room for any separation from the whole.

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As long as you perceive that anyone is holding you back, you have not taken full responsibility for your own liberation. Liberation means that you stand free of making demands on others and on life to make you happy. When you discover yourself to be nothing but freedom, you stop setting up conditions and requirements that need to be satisfied in order for you to be happy. It is in the absolute surrender of all conditions and requirements that liberation is discovered to be who and what you are. Then the love and wisdom that flow out of you have a liberating effect on others.

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Awakening to the truth of unity means to awaken from the dream of a personal self and personal others, to the realization that there is no other. Many spiritual seekers have had glimpses of the absolute unity of all existence, but few are capable of or willing to live up to the many challenging implications inherent in that revelation. The revelation of unity, that there is no other, is a realization of the ultimate nonpersonal nature of all that seems so very personal. Applying this realization to the arena of personal relationships is something that most seekers find extremely challenging. This is the number one reason why so many seekers never come completely to rest in the freedom of the Self Absolute.

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Q: You have spoken of a third entity called “relationship.” Can you speak about what this is?
A:  The third entity is the oneness that shines through when two are in selfless relationship. No longer is the relationship the primary focus; instead, it is the oneness that perfumes each moment of it. True relationship not only elicits this oneness, but it is dedicated to it above all else. So when you’re truly meeting, it is the one essence that shines through.

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Q: Is this the same experience that I’ve noticed in large groups where I recognize a flavor of oneness that varies from group to group?
A:  When I say “oneness,” I am not speaking so much about a flavor of oneness, which a group of people may share. I’m speaking about the perception that the other is myself, and about the joy and love that arise from this perception.

The excerpts above are from the book, The Impact of Awakening, © 2013–2025 by Adyashanti.

The high mountains have always been my cathedral. They’ve been the place where my spirit soars; something quite wonderful happens throughout my whole being when I’m in them. There was a time in my twenties and early thirties when I did a lot of backpacking. I often went into the Sierra Nevada Mountains for two, three, or even four months in the summer, coming out only to get supplies. At one point, I decided it would be nice to do this with a dog to have a companion, because I spent so much time out there by myself.

It seemed reasonable to find a dog that needed an owner, a dog somebody had rejected or had been found wandering. I went to the pound (now they call them animal shelters) and started looking at all the dogs, I was drawn to one in particular—a German shepherd and husky mix. Anyone who has had a pet knows how this goes. I studied the dog, and he had a certain gaze. Even though I could tell he wasn’t happy about being there, I felt a spontaneous, intuitive connection with him, as if I recognized something in him just as he recognized that something in me. I patted him through the fence and talked to him to see how he responded. He took to me quickly. Then I read the little write-up the shelter had written about him, but it wasn’t hopeful: the reasons his previous owners got rid of this dog were because he dug holes all over their backyard and he wasn’t good with small children. Two qualities that you look for in dogs are that they aren’t going to tear up your house by chewing everything and are going to be good around people, especially children. Despite this, I had a deep intuitive sense about the dog. I hung out with him for a while and decided to rely on my intuitive sense: I didn’t know why this dog had caused those problems, but I had the feeling he was fantastic.

I took him home and named him Kinte. He ended up being the dog of my life. We grew very close. He followed me through the house; wherever I went, there he’d go. If I walked into a room and closed the door, he’d sit and wait for me. He’d ride in the car with me. He was so well behaved that I didn’t have to put him on a leash. He turned out to be very gentle around children. I’ve never seen a dog or human being who had Kinte’s patience with kids. They could do anything to him, and he’d let them. He never dug up our yard. Maybe it’s because I exercised him a lot. He was a fantastic Frisbee player. He loved going out with me on ten- or fifteen-mile runs, and he loved to play and have fun. I took him backpacking and he carried his own food and water in a side pack. We had some amazing experiences in the high mountains. Because of his breed—German shepherd and husky—he had great endurance and strength, and relished being out there; you could almost see a smile in the way that he parted his lips a little bit. He ended up being a wonderful, wonderful dog.

Kinte was my magical and beloved companion throughout my early twenties. Everyone who met him loved him because he loved people. He was active, yet kind and gentle and sensitive to people’s feelings. He was one of those animals who is extraordinary at reading emotional energy—much more sensitive than most human beings. He had so many wonderful qualities, and we were extraordinarily close, which is why Kinte was my teacher in so many ways.

Humans like to share experiences, share life, share significant moments and we can do this with pets. Not just the extraordinary times, but the everyday ones as well. Kinte taught me about forgiveness, about emotional attunement, sensitivity to others, about running toward in order to comfort people in difficulty—because that’s what he did. He showed me that there’s something intuitive about the emotional intelligence that many of us grow into as we get older, and our spiritual lives help with that emotional intelligence.

I loved Kinte and like to be around dogs in general because they simply are where they are; they feel what they feel. Everything is out in the open: they’re not hiding anything; they’re not protecting self-consciousness or self-image like human beings often do. We love to relate, and yet we have to open up in order to relate.

Part of loving anything or anyone is having to say goodbye to them. Maybe they leave or you leave. The journey of loving begins by saying “hello” and welcoming something or someone into your life, and the journey ends with saying “goodbye” and letting a loved one exit. They may not exit your heart or your mind, but they’re certainly going to depart—each one of us will.

Sadly, Kinte was no different. He developed a seizure disorder, a form of epilepsy that is common with German shepherds. I tried everything I could to treat him for it, but he had one seizure that went on for a long, long time and nothing we did could stop it. The vet said my dog had to be put down. It was devastating. I was overwhelmed with grief. I had lost my grandparent, who I’d been very close to, and other loved ones had died, but nothing struck me like the loss of this dog. I’d find myself in tears, sitting in the middle of the living room not knowing what to do. It seemed even more ridiculous because I was a twenty-five-year-old guy, and I thought it odd that I would be so overwhelmingly struck with grief at the death of a dog. I had lost other dogs I’d grown up with and had always been sad when they left, but this was something of a different order. German shepherds tend to pick out one person to deeply bond with—it’s like their lover for life—and we shared that profound relationship.

My family had a little ceremony for Kinte in the backyard. We buried a few of his toys with him. I started to read the eulogy I’d written and the well of grief began to spill over—I could feel the sorrow coming. As I was reading, I decided to let go and allow myself to ride this profound wave of heartache that swept over me. Tears fell down my cheeks, over my chin, even onto the ground, and yet I kept reading.

That’s when the strangest thing happened, perhaps because I’d completely let go to the experience of grief. Something unusual occurred right in the middle of my chest. It was as if a pinprick of light glowed from my sternum. As I continued to read and grieve fully, this pinprick of light grew bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and went beyond my body, filling the space all around me. This light radiated a feeling of profound well-being—extraordinary happiness, contentment. It was my first deeply nondual emotional experience in the sense that it included both grief and happiness. It was the first time I realized that two completely opposing emotional states, or states of being, could simultaneously exist in the exact same space without any contradiction whatsoever, that in the core of my grief I could discover a profound sense of joy, contentment, peace and well-being. One didn’t overshadow the other—when the pinprick of light and well-being showed up, it didn’t sweep away all the grief, it happened in the midst of the grief. The grief wasn’t getting in the way of the joy, and the joy wasn’t getting in the way of the grief; they existed as one totality, one gestalt, one moment.

I had faced grief and happiness before, but never simultaneously. Kinte’s death marked the opening of a whole new dimension of understanding for me. I came to see as years went on that any deeply negative emotion that we completely open ourselves to will have a way of showing its opposite. I think of it now like looking at a coin—on one side it’s heads, on the other side it’s tails, but it’s the same coin. Grief and peace aren’t actually separate—they exist as one complete entity. I experienced this whole, this unifying of contrasting emotional experiences, because I completely and absolutely let go in the midst of a difficult experience.

As time went on, I realized that if we can get deep enough into an experience, it almost always includes its opposite. It’s one thing to read about it, but it’s something else entirely to practice it. When we do it’s liberating because we realize that even negative emotions can contain something extraordinarily positive. The nature of things is that everything arises as simultaneity—like a package. We might see it as a package of duality—negative and positive. We can’t necessarily find the light within darkness unless we completely surrender to the darkness, but then the light can show up. It’s the same thing with positive experiences. One of my teachers used to say, “All true love sheds a tear,” and we know when we experience the most profound love that there’s something bittersweet about it—it’s not all sweet. The deepest encounters with love include a bitter quality. Have you ever loved so intensely that it almost hurt to love that much? That’s more in the range of what I’m talking about.

This coexistence of opposites is the true nature of human emotion and experience. It is an immense gestalt, although we usually recognize only joy or sadness, only grief or contentment, separate from the other. This happens for two reasons. One is that we are obsessively focused on the emotion we’re experiencing but we’re not totally surrendered to it, or we haven’t completely let go. The other is that we’re trying to contain and control at the same time that we’re obsessing. When we do that, we only face one side, one aspect of the spectrum, or one side of the duality.

There are times when we undergo something deep and profound and something in us stops resisting, stops pushing against it, stops trying to contain whatever it is we’re experiencing. When we can do that and not fall into indulging (starting to think about thoughts that make us feel worse), we can be with pure experience. There is no thought content, there is no storytelling going on one way or the other, it is an absolute openness to what is or whatever was in that moment. This was my dog Kinte’s last gift to me. Even though I know the realization was coming from within myself, we had such a profound connection that it makes sense that his passing would in some way embody the profundity of our connection.

I felt called to share this story of my wonderful and beloved companion because that’s what he was: more than a pet. And like any good companion, it’s a journey, because you take care of each other. I did a lot to take care of Kinte, but he did as much to take care of me, and I’ll never forget that lesson and that last gift I received while reading his eulogy in the backyard of my parents’ house. As difficult as it was, I encountered a profound grace when I realized that the heart of our experiences is more multilayered and deeper than we often imagine. Loving and saying goodbye to Kinte was a lesson about letting go. I don’t mean letting go of something in order to get rid of it. When I let go into grief, profound joy showed up and the grief and the joy existed simultaneously. When we encounter the immensity of our own experience, we learn that it’s so vast—it’s not what it appears to be on the surface. There are multilayered, multitextured aspects of our experiences if we open deeply and profoundly to them and trust them—a lot of it comes down to trust.

No matter what or who you love—and by “love” I don’t mean “are entertained by” or “like,” but rather what or who you love and give yourself to—it’s expressed in that beautiful dance of giving and receiving in which the more you give, the more you receive, and the more you receive, the more you give. So it goes with humans and with pets—with me and with Kinte. Every part of our experience follows this profound way of unfolding.

© 2011-2025 by Adyashanti.

Meditation is an attempt to connect with a deep part of our being that is not defined by the narration of the mind. Nor is it defined by the turbulent emotional waters that one sometimes meets in meditation. In its deepest sense, meditation is an encounter with the silence of your being. This is the heart of meditation: it is a willingness to be with silence.

Silence is not a big part of our cultural conversation. Instead, we are sold ever-better ways of distracting ourselves and convinced that we cannot do without our gadgets. Notwithstanding the practical uses, technology can become another means of creating chaos and disruption. If we are on social media, the room around us may be quiet, but we are not in a place of silence.

Silence can be disquieting for a lot of us. It can feel strange if you are not used to it, which is ironic, because so much of the activity of nature—of which we are a part—occurs in silence. That is why people like to go for a walk in the woods or somewhere else where they can get away from the hustle and noise of human life: it is a way of entering silence. Meditation is a focused way of doing this. The challenge is that when you start to pay attention to the silence within, that is when you hear the noise, and that is where many people engage in a subtle or overt battle with the chaos of the conceptual mind and with the images of the past or future. However, meditation has nothing whatsoever to do with controlling your mind. As a teacher of mine once told me, “If you go to war with your mind, you will be at war forever.” What would it mean not to be at war with our minds, with our feelings, and with ourselves?

If you are not careful, meditation can become a spiritual competition—not with someone else, but between the desire to be still and the movement of mind. To be in competition is not meditation. To try to constrain all the disparate thoughts in your mind through concentration is not meditation; it is concentration. Meditation is a deep state of listening. That is the heart of it: listening to the quiet places, but as you do so, trying not to assert your will or make your mind conform to a certain pattern, whether to quiet it or to force thinking or not thinking along certain lines.

In meditation, what you are doing is letting go of all forms of conflict and allowing every single part of experience and every single perception to be exactly as it is, because it already is right. We feel the way we feel, we think the way we think, and our internal environment is the way it is in any given moment, so we might as well come into alignment with it. In that sense, meditation runs against the grain. Sometimes we think, If I could figure my problem out, then I would not have a problem. But sometimes trying to figure out your problem is creating another problem. To listen to the quiet spaces inside, you must allow every part of your experience to be the way it is. If you do not, then you are in some form of conflict with it, attempting to control how you think or feel. Meditation is the relinquishing of control, not the perfecting of control.

Try looking at it from a subjective point of view: a thought arises and then passes as if floating down a stream. If we are focused on the stream or whether there are thoughts or are not thoughts, then we are engaging in controlled, willful thinking. “Willful thinking” means intentionally engaging the process of thinking. There is a time to do that, but meditation is not that time.

The depth of your meditation depends on your capacity to listen, and most people are not listening when they meditate. They get stuck in whatever technique they are using, caught up in trying to meditate correctly or what they imagine to be correctly, and trying to quiet their mind. There is an unspoken, sometimes unacknowledged agenda that you can carry into meditation, and if you are not careful, that agenda will become your meditation. In other words, you will be meditating on your agenda, whether that agenda is for a quiet mind, or to be at peace, or to feel bliss, or whatever it may be. Meditation is the relinquishing of agenda. It is the natural rhythm of thought when you are not consciously adding to it or trying to take anything away from it, when you are not trying to make it happen or stop it from happening.

There is a soft quality to meditation, a fluid quality, because your experience is constantly changing. It is all movement; if you try to stop the fluidity, you go against the natural flow of consciousness. In this sense meditation is about nonopposition, as it is the most subjective form of practicing nonviolence and noninterference. When you are trying to change things, or trying to stop something from happening, or chasing after what you hope will happen, that is a subtle form of violence or control. Meditation is the relinquishing of that attitude, and you cannot let go of what you do not acknowledge. So first acknowledge any desire to control and any conditional effort to control; see it and watch it play out.

Meditation is seeing all of this. It is coming to know the nature of your mind and experiencing when your mind tries to dominate itself, when there is a thought that says, I must stop thinking, which is itself a thought; it is seeing thought as thought. It is not necessarily evaluating thought, it is not measuring thought or distinguishing the good from the bad or the useful from the useless, as that is for another time. Meditation is about seeing the whole nature of experience. As you watch your mind, you start to see that trying to control it tends to add conflict, and being too rigid about it sets up an even deeper groove of rigidity in your mind and in your body.

When the watching of the mind grows profound, what Buddhists call “one pointed,” then the quality of our awareness begins to allow us to access a deeper state of consciousness and a deeper state of silence. In essence, meditation is like getting into an elevator and taking it to the ground floor; it is a sinking down into your conscious experience of being. We do not have to know how to make it happen, because there is no “how.” It is not what we do that allows us to access great depth in meditation. It is as much what we do not do and what we let go of doing. Meditation is the art of letting go of doing.

Excerpted from The Most Important Thing.
© 2019 by Adyashanti. Published by Sounds True.

Excerpted from Adya’s book Sacred Inquiry

Q: I know directly and profoundly that I am nothing. And from that knowing it’s clear, at least intellectually and maybe more deeply, that the multiplicity of appearance is an expression of nothingness. But I still get caught in multiplicity, especially in anger and despair over the havoc we are causing on the planet. It seems to me that until I can hold the facts of resource depletion, species extinction, and climate change in the space of nothingness, the process of awakening is incomplete.

Do I accept that the humanity in me will always be outraged about these things and that there can simultaneously be a knowing of the nothingness of it? Or is there a “place” where there is only abiding in the nothingness of multiplicity? How can I work with this incompleteness and know that I am everything in the way Nisargadatta did?

A: So many people are outraged at the senseless way that we treat each other and this amazing planet that we find ourselves on. Does that outrage solve the immense problems of humanity, or does it fuel them? It seems to me that the world does not need any more outrage than it already has. It does, though, desperately need more love put into action. Perhaps your feelings of outrage are actually originating in a love that you have not yet fully acknowledged and acted upon. Perhaps if you saw how much you truly care and love, and got on with expressing that as best you could, you would not feel outraged and afraid. Love denied turns to anger. Love expressed creates the space and conditions where more love can flower. Love isn’t just a feeling—it is an act of courage.

© Adyashanti 2021

When it comes to awakening, I have found two elements to be the most helpful and most powerful. The first is developing a meditative attitude, in which we let go of control on a very deep level and allow everything to be as it is. The second is a serious engagement with our own inherent curiosity and intelligence through meditative self-inquiry. Either one of these two separated can be incomplete: Inquiry separated from meditation can become intellectual and abstract; meditation separated from inquiry can result in our getting lost in various different spiritual states. Combined, they provide the necessary energy, the necessary impetus, to produce a flash of recognition of your true nature. And in the end, that is what spirituality is all about.

WHAT IS A SPIRITUALLY POWERFUL QUESTION?
Meditative self-inquiry is the art of asking a spiritually powerful question. And a question that is spiritually powerful always points us back to ourselves. Because the most important thing that leads to spiritual awakening is to discover who and what we are—to wake up from this dream state, this trance state of identification with ego. And for this awakening to occur, there needs to be some transformative energy that can flash into consciousness. It needs to be an energy that is actually powerful enough to awaken consciousness out of its trance of separateness into the truth of our being. Inquiry is an active engagement with our own experience that can cultivate this flash of spiritual insight.

The most important thing in spiritual inquiry is to ask the right question. The right question is a question that genuinely has energy for you. In spirituality, the most important thing initially is to ask yourself, What is the most important thing? What is spirituality about for you? What is the question that’s in your deepest heart? Not the question that some- one tells you should be there, not what you’ve learned it should be. But what is the question for you? If you meditate, why are you doing it? What question are you trying to answer?

The most intimate question we can ask, and the one that has the most spiritual power, is this: What or who am I? Before I wonder why I am here, maybe I should find out who this “I” is who is asking the question. Before I ask “What is God?” maybe I should ask who I am, this “I” who is seeking God. Who am I, who is actually living this life? Who is right here, right now? Who is on the spiritual path? Who is it that is meditating? Who am I really? It is this question which begins the journey of spiritual self-inquiry, finding out, for your own self, who and what you truly are.

So step number one of self-inquiry is having a spiritually powerful question, such as “Who or what am l?” Step number two is knowing how to ask that question.

THE WAY OF SUBTRACTION
Before we actually find out what we are, we must first find out what we are not. Otherwise our assumptions will continue to contaminate the whole investigation. We could call this the way of subtraction. In the Christian tradition, they call this the Via Negativa, the negative path. In the Hindu tradition of Vedanta, they call this neti neti, which means “not this, not that.” These are all paths of subtraction, ways of finding out what we are by finding out what we are not.

We start by looking at the assumptions we have about who we are. For example, we look at our minds and we notice that there are thoughts. Clearly there is something or someone that is noticing the thoughts. You may not know what it is, but you know it’s there. Thoughts come and go, but that which is witnessing the thoughts remains.

If thoughts come and go, then they aren’t really what you are. Starting to realize that you are not your thoughts is very significant, since most people assume they are what they think. Yet a simple look into your own experience reveals that you are the witness of your thoughts. Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren’t who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.

In the same way, there are feelings—happiness, sadness, anxiety, joy, peace—and then there is the witness of those feelings. Feelings come and go, but the awareness of feelings remains.

The same is true for beliefs. We have many beliefs, and we have the awareness of those beliefs. They may be spiritual beliefs, beliefs about your neighbor, beliefs about your parents, beliefs about yourself (which are usually the most damaging), beliefs about a whole variety of things. Beliefs are thoughts that we assume to be true. We can all see that our beliefs have changed as we’ve grown, as we move through a lifetime. Beliefs come and go, but they do not tell us who the watcher is. The watcher or the witness stands before the beliefs.

The same thing goes for our ego personality. We tend to think that we are our egos, that we are our personalities. And yet, just as with thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, we can come to see that there is a witness to our ego personality. There’s an ego personality called “you,” and then there is a watching of the ego personality. The awareness of the ego personality stands before the personality; it is noticing it, without judging, without condemning.

Here we’ve started to move into something more intimate. Your essential, deepest nature cannot be your personality. Your ego personality is being watched by something more primary; it is being witnessed by awareness.

With that, we arrive at awareness itself. We notice that there is awareness. You are aware of what you think. You are aware of how you feel. So awareness is clearly present. It is not something that needs to be cultivated or manufactured. Awareness simply is. It is that which makes it possible to know, to experience what is happening.

WHO IS AWARE?
No sooner do we get back to awareness itself than we encounter the primary assumption that “I am the one who is aware.” So we investigate that assumption, and discover time and time again that we cannot find out who it is that is aware. Where is this “I” that is aware? It is at this precise moment—the moment when we realize that we cannot find an entity called “me” who owns or possesses awareness—that it starts to dawn on us that maybe we ourselves are awareness itself.

This self-recognition can’t be understood in the mind. It’s a leap that the mind can’t make. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought. That’s why we call this a transcendent recognition. It’s actually our identity waking up from the prison of separation to its true state. This is both simple and extraordinarily profound. It is a flash of revelation.

One of the simplest pointers I can give here is to remember that this process of inquiry and investigation really takes place from the neck down. An example of this is when you ask yourself, “What am l?” The first thing most people realize is that they don’t know. So most people will go into their minds to try to figure it out. But the first thing that your mind knows is that you don’t know. In spiritual inquiry that’s very useful information. “I don’t know what I am. I don’t know who I am.”

Once you recognize that, you can either think about it or you can actually feel it. What’s it like when you look inside to find out who you are and you don’t find an entity called “you”? What does that open space feel like? Feel it in your body; let it register in the cells of your being. This is real spiritual inquiry. This transforms what might have been just an abstract thought in the mind into something that is very visceral, very kinesthetic, and very spiritually powerful.

Once we recognize ourselves as awareness itself, our identity can begin to rest in its essence. Who we are is no longer found in our body, mind, personality, thoughts, and beliefs. Who we are rests in its source. When we rest in our source, our body and mind and personality and thoughts and feelings come into harmony.

THE GREAT INCLUSION
After the Way of Subtraction comes what I call the Great Inclusion. When we start to let go into awareness or spirit, we start to recognize that that is who and what we are. We start to see that everything in existence is simply a manifestation or expression of spirit, whether it’s the chair, or the floor, or your shoes, or the trees outside, the sky, the body that you call “you,” the mind, the ego, the personality, everything—all are expressions of spirit.

When our identification is caught in these various forms, the result is suffering. But when, through inquiry and meditation, our identity starts to come back to its home ground of awareness, then everything is included. You discover that your humanness is in no way separate from the divinity within you, which is what you actually are.

Now please don’t try to understand this with your mind. This is really not understandable in the mind. This knowing resides at a deeper point, at a deeper place within ourselves. Something else understands; something else knows.

THAT WHICH REMAINS THE SAME
Nobody can force this flash of recognition into being. It happens spontaneously. It happens by itself. But what we can do is cultivate the ground and create the conditions under which this flash of recognition happens. We can open our minds to deeper possibilities and start to investigate for ourselves what we really and truly are.

When this awakening to our true nature happens, it may happen for a moment, or it may happen for a longer period of time, or it may happen permanently. Whichever way it occurs, it is perfectly okay. Who you are is who you are. You cannot lose who you are, no matter what your experience is. Even if you have a certain opening and you realize your true nature, and then later you think you’ve forgotten it, you haven’t lost anything.

Therefore the invitation is always to rest more and more deeply, to not grasp at an insight or an experience, to not try and hold on to it, but to recognize the underlying reality, that which never changes. The great 20th-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi had a saying, “Let what comes come; let what goes go. Find out what remains.”

© 2019-2024 by Adyashanti. Written for Yoga International.

The enlightenment I speak of is not simply a realization, not simply the discovery of one’s true nature. This discovery is just the beginning—the point of entry into an inner revolution. Realization does not guarantee this revolution; it simply makes it possible.

What is this inner revolution? To begin with, revolution is not static; it is alive, ongoing, and continuous. It cannot be grasped or made to fit into any conceptual model. Nor is there any path to this inner revolution, for it is neither predictable nor controllable and has a life all its own. This revolution is a breaking away from the old, repetitive, dead structures of thought and perception that humanity finds itself trapped in. Realization of the ultimate reality is a direct and sudden existential awakening to one’s true nature that opens the door to the possibility of an inner revolution. Such a revolution requires an ongoing emptying out of the old structures of consciousness and the birth of a living and fluid intelligence. This intelligence restructures your entire being—body, mind, and perception. This intelligence cuts the mind free of its old structures that are rooted within the totality of human consciousness. If one cannot become free of the old conditioned structures of human consciousness, then one is still in a prison.

Having an awakening to one’s true nature does not necessarily mean that there will be an ongoing revolution in the way one perceives, acts, and responds to life. The moment of awakening shows us what is ultimately true and real as well as revealing a deeper possibility in the way that life can be lived from an undivided and unconditioned state of being. But the moment of awakening does not guarantee this deeper possibility, as many who have experienced spiritual awakening can attest to. Awakening opens a door inside to a deep inner revolution, but in no way guarantees that it will take place. Whether it takes place or not depends on many factors, but none more important and vital than an earnest and unambiguous intention for truth above and beyond all else. This earnest intention toward truth is what all spiritual growth ultimately depends upon, especially when it transcends all personal preferences, agendas, and goals.

This inner revolution is the awakening of an intelligence not born of the mind but of an inner silence of mind, which alone has the ability to uproot all of the old structures of one’s consciousness. Unless these structures are uprooted, there will be no creative thought, action, or response. Unless there is an inner revolution, nothing new and fresh can flower. Only the old, the repetitious, the conditioned will flower in the absence of this revolution. But our potential lies beyond the known, beyond the structures of the past, beyond anything that humanity has established. Our potential is something that can flower only when we are no longer caught within the influence and limitations of the known. Beyond the realm of the mind, beyond the limitations of humanity’s conditioned consciousness, lies that which can be called the sacred. And it is from the sacred that a new and fluid consciousness is born that wipes away the old and brings to life the flowering of a living and undivided expression of being. Such an expression is neither personal nor impersonal, neither spiritual nor worldly, but rather the flow and flowering of existence beyond all notions of self.

So let us understand that reality transcends all of our notions about reality. Reality is neither Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Advaita Vedanta, nor Buddhist. It is neither dualistic nor nondualistic, neither spiritual nor nonspiritual. We should come to know that there is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about reality. When we perceive from an undivided consciousness, we will find the sacred in every expression of life. We will find it in our teacup, in the fall breeze, in the brushing of our teeth, in each and every moment of living and dying. Therefore we must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all—not once but continually.

One must be willing to stand alone—in the unknown, with no reference to the known or the past or any of one’s conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility. One must stand in that dark light, in that groundless embrace, unwavering and true to the reality beyond all self—not just for a moment, but forever without end. For then that which is sacred, undivided, and whole is born within consciousness and begins to express itself. 

© Adyashanti 2008 

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

Winter has come to the Sierra Nevada Mountain range where Mukti and I live, bringing with it snow, cold temperatures, and the unadorned beauty of nature shedding its spring and summer blooms and returning to its winter roots. The aspen trees in the canyon are bare now, having lost all of their yellow and golden fall leaves weeks ago, and the pines in the high country are heavy with glittering cotton candy snow, clutching to the branches and outstretched pine needles. The bears have all gone into hibernation by now, and the deer are quietly making their way down from the high meadows and streams to lower slopes in search of food. And as I shoveled a few feet of newly fallen snow from the steps leading to the front door, I was pulled into the spirit of nature’s winter return all around me.

Each one of us is as much a part of nature and the natural world as hibernating bears, deer on the move, or a cold winter storm moving in over the horizon. And yet even though we insulate ourselves from so many of the ways of nature, we ourselves are nature, and we reflect, in our consciousness, the same rhythms and patterns as the natural world all around us. If you are paying attention, you can feel the pattern of return and restoration during these winter months. You can also feel the natural movement of falling away and surrender that happens each and every winter, as the leaves fall from the trees and the blooms relinquish their petals to the forest floor to become nutrients for the re-emergence of new blooms in the spring. We are of course conditioned to look at new and pretty things, but all of life’s beauty arises from the primordial ground beyond all names and forms. If nothing falls away, there will be no room or energy for the new, the transformational, the life-giving renewal of spirit deep in the heart of everything.

This new year, I will be returning to teaching after a year-long sabbatical. My sabbatical has been a year of continuous return, of withering down to the essential. There is an old Zen saying that goes, “on the withered branch, a flower blooms.” Like all things Zen, great insight is conveyed in the most simple and natural forms of expression and with the minimum of explanation. We all like beautiful flowers, but conveniently dismiss the withered branches from which they arise and express.

The western mind is allured and attached to all things spring and summer, but the roots of wisdom and insight are forged in the withering and return of winter. The sun gods of various religions have always been popular throughout history; they are the charismatic superstars of mythology. But every sun god arises from the primordial ground, where, as Meister Eckhart said, “distinction never gazed.” Winter is itself a metaphor for “where distinction never gazed.” But winter is more than a metaphor, it is a material living expression of life’s return. Winter is the process of life casting off what is no longer essential or life-sustaining, renewing itself by a return to the essential, the core, the root of all that we are.

By joining with the natural movement of winter, and allowing the return of our consciousness to its roots in the primordial, the essential, the unconscious ground of all being, we not only awaken but we also nurture the dynamic and creative aspect of spirit by plunging it into its silent source. A source that can be realized but never turned into the known. So, let us embrace the wintertime of spirituality, and the great return to the essential, and to a mind that is not stuck in its own imagined knowing, thereby always being open to reality as reality.

© Adyashanti 2022

Once, at a retreat where I was teaching, a woman came up to the microphone and said, “I feel such immense rage inside me! Even as I’m sitting here at this retreat, where I’m not being disturbed and not being challenged, I just feel so much rage! I look at people, and find myself judging them and being resentful of them for no reason whatsoever. A lot of my life, I’ve walked around feeling really, really angry.”

I could see in her eyes and in the way she held her body that these emotions of rage and anger had really taken over her whole system. What I said was, “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to your rage.”

At first, she looked at me kind of perplexed. She didn’t know what I meant, so I said it again. I said, “I want to speak to the emotion of rage. Tell me how it views life, what it thinks about others. What are its judgments about the most significant people in your life?”

She looked at me with a sense of horror, and she said, “Oh, no! Not that!”

I said, “Yes, yes, yes. That’s what I want to talk to. I want you to give rage a voice. Stop holding yourself as separate from it, stop trying to get rid of it. Just for a moment, let your mind become a reflection of it.”

Fortunately, she had great courage. Because she had suffered so much, she was willing to take a chance, and so she started to speak to me from the emotion of rage. What spilled out were all of her toxic thoughts and ideas, all the ways her mind had formed conclusions about life and the people in her life, many of which were based on some very difficult moments in her upbringing. As I kept encouraging her by saying, “Yes!” and “Tell me more!” and “Tell me more!” she became more and more willing to let this voice of rage speak. As she did, all of the judgment, blaming, and condemning came out of her. Then, after she spoke in this way for a while, a softer voice began to emerge. It was the voice of deep hurt and sorrow. It was a more intimate, less guarded voice. She was literally giving voice to her pain and suffering. And as she did, I began to see exactly why she was suffering so much.

ALLOW YOUR SUFFERING TO SPEAK

Our suffering consists of two components: a mental component and an emotional component. We usually think of these two aspects as separate, but in fact, when we’re in deep states of suffering, we’re usually so overwhelmed by the experience of emotion that we forget and become unconscious of the story in our minds that is creating and maintaining it. So one of the most vital steps in addressing our suffering and moving beyond it is first to summon the courage and willingness to truly experience what we’re feeling and to no longer try to edit what we feel. In order to really allow ourselves to stay with the depth of our emotions, we must cease judging ourselves for whatever comes up.

I invite you to set some time aside—perhaps a half an hour—to allow yourself simply to feel whatever is there: to let any sensation, feeling, or emotion come up without trying to avoid or “solve” it. Simply let whatever is there arise. Get in touch with the kinesthetic feeling of it, of what these experiences are like when you’re not trying to push or explain them away. Just experience the raw energy of the emotion or sensation. You might notice it in your heart or your solar plexus, or in your gut. See if you can identify where the tightness is in your body—not only where the emotion is, but what parts of your body feel rigid. It could be your neck or shoulders or it might be your back. Suffering manifests as emotion—often as deep, painful emotion—and also as tension throughout the body. Suffering also manifests as certain patterns of circular thinking. Once you touch a particular emotion, allow yourself to begin to hear the voice of suffering. To do this, you cannot stand outside the suffering, trying to explain or solve it; you must really sink into the pain, even relax into the suffering so that you can allow the suffering to speak.

Many of us have a great hesitancy to do this, because when suffering speaks, it often has a very shocking voice. It can be quite vicious. This kind of voice is something that most people do not want to believe they have inside them, and yet to move beyond suffering it’s vital that we allow ourselves to experience the totality of it. It’s important that we open all the emotions and all of the thoughts in order to fully experience what is there.

When you notice some emotional hurt within you, allow your mind to speak to you, inside your head. Or you might even speak out loud. Often I’ll suggest to people that they write down what the voice of their suffering says. Try to keep it as short as possible, so that each sentence is contained in and of itself. For example, the voice of suffering might say something like, “I hate the world!” “The world is never fair!” “I never got what I wanted!” “My mother never gave me the love I needed!” and so on. Often, if it’s all kept in your head, it just turns into a big muddle. So the first step in releasing this muddle is to speak or write these voices of suffering.

What you’re looking for is how your suffering, how the particular emotion you are experiencing, actually views your life, views what happened, and views what’s happening now. To do this, you need to get in touch with the story of your suffering. It is through these stories that we maintain our suffering, so we need to speak or write these stories down—even if the stories sound outrageously judgmental or blaming or condemning. If we allow these stories to live underground, in the unconscious mind, all the painful emotions will continue to regenerate.

So now take a moment to allow a piece of your suffering to tell its story. First, name the emotion, then let it speak. What does this emotion think of you? What does it think of others, of your friends, your family? What does it hate most? Why does it appear in any given day? What is underneath these emotions? Let your suffering tell its entire story.

Excerpted from Adyashanti’s book, Falling into Grace, 2011.

© Adyashanti and Sounds True 2011