LIBRARY

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.

Online Course Q&A Excerpted from Adyashanti’s “The Way of Liberation Audio Course Q&A”

A participant writes: I am writing this with fear to do so. I have stayed in the background reading only nonduality books daily and listening to your CDs for the past four years. I am aware of this fear of abandonment and rejection from authority and yet also realize the fear keeps me creating and living what I fear.

When my husband passed away (four years ago) I had a profound clarity at his bedside before his passing. After, I had to be profoundly alone. I moved to CA by myself not really knowing anyone and have stayed alone for all this time. In a way, my only friends were nonduality books and CDs which I read and listened to daily.

Nine months ago, my Mom had a stroke and nearly did not make it. I had four brothers and three of them passed away in their 20s. Now the only family I have is my Mom and my one brother.

Somehow I isolate myself even though I also have this clarity. There is such a tiredness feeling that there is nowhere to go and nothing left to trust in this place we call the world. Perhaps I am afraid to love and be loved with having all the loss. The feeling is a feeling of loss, abandonment, rejection, trust, and also realizing and aware that this is the life I am creating from these deep core feelings.

It is huge for me to expose this as it feels like there is no one who is going to care and it just may be easier to not take the risk. It seems that I have created a belief there is no one I can trust to be there to care. I have put myself in a place where I no longer know how to be with the others in the way I once loved to be.

Where do I start to trust being alive again and trust life to be alive?

Adyashanti: Thank you for your question and your courage in opening up and asking for help. Sooner or later we will all experience the tragic quality of life. Perhaps this quality of life is brought to us through illness, or the death of a loved one, or losing a job, or an unexpected accident, or having your heart broken. But we will all experience this tragic quality of life in both small and overwhelmingly large ways over the span of our lives. Whether we want to face it or not, life, with all of its beauty, joy, and majesty, also has a tragic element to it. This is exactly what the Buddha saw, and it inspired his entire spiritual search.

It seems that most people look for various ways to escape from this tragic quality of life, but ultimately to no avail. There is no escaping it. And it must be faced sooner or later. The question is, when we are faced with this aspect of life, how do we respond? Surely, to avoid it only leads to denial, fantasy, life-numbing withdrawal, cynicism, and fear. It takes great courage to face the totality of life without withdrawing from it or trying to protect ourselves from it.

Paradoxically, to face the totality of life we must face the reality of death, sorrow, and loss as well. We must face them as unavoidable aspects of life. The question is, can we face them directly without getting lost in the stories that our mind weaves about them? That is, can we directly encounter this tragic quality of life on its own terms? Because if we can, we will find a tremendous affirmation of life, an affirmation that is forged in the fierce embrace of tragedy.

At the very heart and core of our being, there exists an overwhelming yes to existence. This yes is discovered by those who have the courage to open their hearts to the totality of life. This yes is not a return to the innocence of youth, for there is no going back, only forward. This yes is found only by embracing the reality of sorrow and going beyond it. It is the courage to love in spite of all the reasons to not love. By embracing the tragic quality of life we come upon a depth of love that can love “in spite of” this tragic quality. Even though your heart may be broken a thousand times, this unlimited love reaches across the multitude of sorrows of life and always triumphs. It triumphs by directly facing tragedy, by relenting to its fierce grace, and embracing it in spite of the reflex to protect ourselves.

In the end, we will either retreat into self-protection, or acknowledge the reality of sorrow and love anyway. Such love not only transcends life and death, it is also made manifest in life and death. You give yourself to life out of love, and it is to love more fiercely that you walk through the fires of sorrow that forge the heart into boundless affection.

© Adyashanti 2015

On Monday, March 2, 2015, my beloved father and friend, Larry Gray, passed away from this world while surrounded by his wife, Carol, three children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It was a great blessing and honor to be with him when he passed. Those of you who have heard me teach over the past years have no doubt heard me tell many stories about our close and loving relationship. Before retiring to Oregon with my mother, he was a constant presence at sangha events, where he formed many of the deepest and most loving friendships of his life.

Although his body was deteriorating over the last five years of his life due to a heart attack, stroke, and finally cancer, he finally found the love and gratitude that he had been seeking within himself his entire adult life. His most commonly used phrase during the last few years of his life was, “I love you.” He was and is an enduring testimony to the power of transformation amidst the fierce challenges of life.

One of the last things that he said to me when he was still well enough to speak clearly was, “Beloved teacher, trusted friend.” Then he bowed deeply. And so in his passing I also say to him, “Beloved teacher, trusted friend, I bow to your life and your legacy.”

With Great Love,
Adyashanti

Memorial for My Father

Well Dad, my beloved friend, fellow adventurer, unwavering supporter, spiritual companion, and truth seeker — here we are. You asked me several times over the last few years of your life what happens after we die, and now you know with the unwavering certainty of direct experience. You need no explanation, no belief, no faith, no hope or promise of any kind. You are living the living of death, which is eternal life. You have gone through the crucible and emerged in complete poverty and innocence. You have been stripped down to your radiance. And I meet you in the void of light where our masks lie on a stage that actors dare not step onto. And so I will remain silent with you about that which no words can convey.

I so enjoyed the form of you — your perfect imperfection and the way you stumbled toward the spontaneity of Love. In our own ragged way it is we, those who stand together here now and call ourselves family with all of our perfect flaws, who embody the one worthwhile virtue: We love one another. That is our humble family legacy, and it is we who bear the burden of loving one another unto the ends of this life through the crucible of forgiveness. It is we who honor you best by continuing your death into love by living in the fire of benevolence and compassion toward one another without reservation.

My heart does not break for the dead but for the living. For it is the living who must continue in the sunlight of your absence, and embrace the invisible mercy of your presence. I cry for Mom’s beautiful and broken Heart, even as I know that she will heal into the brightness of joy in time. Mom, you have been the embodiment of committed love, fidelity, and selfless caregiving, and I pray that you will be able to receive as much love as you have given — for the circle of benevolence must complete itself in receiving as much as in giving. You have poured yourself out as a fountain of sun and I will always be here for you as you were always there for Dad. For our legacy is Love and the living of it.

In the dark light of my solitude, where I died by the hand of grace into the Great Void of my nothingness in my 25th year, I find you, Dad. I welcome you into what I could not tell you with words. You have been stripped down to your radiance, and the entire universe is now contained within your single glance. The sky and clouds and laughter and tears express your true personality, and we the living are the recipients of your final glance and the last breath of your departure into eternal presence. Our grief contains the celebration of your deliverance into boundless joy, and our tears are the sunshine of your emancipated love.

These words of Walt Whitman come to mind: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself . . . I contain multitudes.” And so Dad did you contradict, and contain multitudes. You lived a human life after all. Did you expect anything more or want anything less? I for one loved you as you were. I never expected you to embody anything less than multitudes. And so I celebrate the earth and sky of you, and the perfection of your contradictions, and the way you lavished yourself unto your humanity. And I see that you are as spotless as a lamb, and as perfect as anything can ever be, that breathed the soil of this earth.

And so I will bring to an end this little remembrance of Dad, leaving all the touching and fun-filled stories to those of you gathered here today. Dad’s and my relationship was the envy of almost everyone that I know, and it will not end here but will live on and affect thousands of people all over the world for years and even generations to come. Dad’s death is a reminder and an inspiration to me to love without measure, to be an indiscriminate lover of what is, whatever it may be, to be daily grateful for all that is and all that isn’t, and to spread love and laughter to the very end.

Written in honor of Larry Gray by Adya's uncle, William Rockloff:

Join Gentle Now the Light

It is here where only we can stand
Our world among ten thousand worlds
Reaching for God’s long arm and hand
To bring the child's awakening sight.

Join gentle now this new light.
Go gentle now and join the sky of night
To scatter suns of love.
Join gentle the endless smile of Heaven.

Dark sky made dark by light.
Sun’s brilliance made light by night.
Join gentle now the light and make whole
The spinning bowl of all that is

In Heaven known, and so in earth
In darkness death, and deathless birth.
The turning whole of night and sun
Join gentle now all into one.

~ William Rockloff

© Adyashanti 2015