Excerpted from the book “Sacred Inquiry: Questions That Can Transform Your Life”
Q: After forty years of seeking and searching and practicing and cul-de-sacs and dead ends and moments of enlightening grace, your message is bringing it all together and dismantling it. It’s amazing that it comes to this.
The question: I come from a long legacy of Methodist ministers, and being good seems to have been the whole point of that and most religious teachings. Now I find myself struggling with not knowing whether my impulse to love and serve is more “good ego” or if it is coming from beyond that. My awareness of ego, and uncovering and dismantling it, is becoming quite constant, yet this confusion seems to be yet another of its tricks. How can I tell?
A: Of course there is nothing wrong (and much that is relatively right) with...
Excerpted from the book “Sacred Inquiry: Questions That Can Transform Your Life”
Q: After forty years of seeking and searching and practicing and cul-de-sacs and dead ends and moments of enlightening grace, your message is bringing it all together and dismantling it. It’s amazing that it comes to this.
The question: I come from a long legacy of Methodist ministers, and being good seems to have been the whole point of that and most religious teachings. Now I find myself struggling with not knowing whether my impulse to love and serve is more “good ego” or if it is coming from beyond that. My awareness of ego, and uncovering and dismantling it, is becoming quite constant, yet this confusion seems to be yet another of its tricks. How can I tell?
A: Of course there is nothing wrong (and much that is relatively right) with being a good and loving person, unless it becomes an identity. Good and loving acts are a virtue, but being identified with those acts easily becomes a vice. In truth, you are not a good or bad person, you are spirit itself. And although spirit usually gets associated with the good, it is actually far beyond being relatively good or bad.
All relative identities belong to the ego, as in “I am good.” But spirit is simply “I am”—not “I am this or that.” Abide in the felt sense of “I” with no conceptual overlay. True love springs forth from spirit, which is pure “I am.” The “I am” is naturally loving and egoless. Meditate on the sense of “I,” and it will lead you into that state which is the source of “I am.”
Ego is “I am this or that,” while the pure “I” is beyond ego and all definitions. It is without form, either physical or conceptual. It is pure consciousness and presence. By attending to your absolute subjectivity, you awaken as the unseen subject to all experience. The universal sense of the unseen self is the universal “I am,” which is all-encompassing unity and oneness.
And as I have tried to clarify, when both self and Self fall away in the experience of no-self (as in the crucifixion), the ultimate ground of existence is realized, and a new (resurrected) life begins.
The impulse to love and be of service can be coming from your higher nature, or true self. But it could also be coming from the ego which easily forms an identity around being “a good person.” If it is coming from your higher nature, it will flow from a natural abundance of well-being and you will feel no attachment to being viewed as a good or helpful person. If it is tinged with ego, it will be a way that you like to be seen by others, as well as an identity that you like to see yourself as. True nature is beyond being a good or bad person; it is pure being as such, prior to all relative identities.
© Adyashanti 2020
When we are engaging in spiritual practice from the viewpoint of boundless reality, there is no subject and object, no “me” seeking something from practice, and no seeking outside of oneself or outside of the present. I’m stating this in negative terms, but only for the purpose of countering how the ego engages in spiritual practice. The ego’s strategic viewpoint serves as a means of achieving something outside of, or beyond, what is presently given in each moment. Not that the egocentric view of spiritual practice is necessarily wrong, but it is limited and bound by the dualistic outlook that defines its perspective.
I vividly remember being bound by just this sort of dualistic attitude in the early years of my spiritual quest. I very much saw my spiritual practice as a means to an end: namely, to achieve enlightenment. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this strategy simply served to continue...
When we are engaging in spiritual practice from the viewpoint of boundless reality, there is no subject and object, no “me” seeking something from practice, and no seeking outside of oneself or outside of the present. I’m stating this in negative terms, but only for the purpose of countering how the ego engages in spiritual practice. The ego’s strategic viewpoint serves as a means of achieving something outside of, or beyond, what is presently given in each moment. Not that the egocentric view of spiritual practice is necessarily wrong, but it is limited and bound by the dualistic outlook that defines its perspective.
I vividly remember being bound by just this sort of dualistic attitude in the early years of my spiritual quest. I very much saw my spiritual practice as a means to an end: namely, to achieve enlightenment. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this strategy simply served to continue to separate me from what I was seeking. As if I were sprinting to the finish line at the end of a marathon, but the faster I sprinted, the faster the finish line receded away from me. It was not until I had thoroughly exhausted myself with my efforts to the point of total collapse, that I realized the elusive goal of awakening was not only exceedingly near, it was exactly no distance away from me at all. In fact, it was the very foundation of my being, and the foundation of all beings.
The awakened condition is not something to be achieved, found, or grasped. It is our natural condition from the very beginning. The reason that we do not experience it is because it is not hidden—which is a very strange idea, but nonetheless true. We also do not experience it because we are simply too identified with and beholden to the egocentric perspective. We therefore engage in spiritual practice from that perspective, even though it is the sole obstruction to the awakening for which we strive. Awakening is not a thing to be perceived—rather, it is clear perception itself. And it is not attained by the ego; it is clear perception becoming conscious of itself.
From the mature ego’s perspective, we are helping true nature realize itself, rather than trying to attain it for ourselves as egos. However, ultimately we are true nature realizing itself in a deeper and deeper way, and in a profoundly human way.
In order to help this realization, our spiritual practice must be very embodied, very earthy and natural. For example, when we meditate, we sit down with our body, reconnect, and bring our mind back to the immediate and concrete aspects of our experience: our posture, our breath, and our senses. These are the material facts of embodied existence, they are not theoretical, abstract or imagined.
The ego is a product of the mind, and it lives predominately in the mind, and in the emotions that are created by the mind’s interpretation of events. Although the ego is profoundly attached to its identification with the body, it is not actually very conscious of the body, as the body is prior to the ego’s interpretations. So even though the ego is profoundly attached to the body, and feels contained within its confines, it lives in a rather disembodied state. A state created and maintained by its attachment to, and identification with, thoughts, ideas, memories, and opinions. And if we are not very careful, the ego will be driving our spiritual practice and doing so within the very limited confines of its personal agenda. Whereas a truly embodied spiritual practice will seek to be connected with the immediate and concrete facts of existence as they exist prior to the ego’s interpretations, desires and demands.
There is a profound paradox that you may have noticed in this teaching. The best way to go beyond identification with the body and the ego, is to attend to the body by being mindfully present to the direct and immediate experience of material existence as it is prior to the ego’s interpretations. This will naturally lead us to developing more and more subtle perception until we can perceive the nondual nature of body, mind, and spirit. Our true nature makes no distinction between the material and the immaterial, between consciousness and the empirical world. To our true nature, these distinctions that the human mind makes are at best sometimes useful, but never ultimately real.
Which is simply to say that there is more dharma in a single leaf on a tree than in all the sutras ever written. There is indeed a reality beyond all material form, but it is on full display in each and every fall of the breath, or heartbeat, or grain of sand on the beach. The world’s greatest spiritual teachings are simply ways of articulating the great reality that lies fully embodied right before our very eyes.
Always and already.
Copyright © 2021 Adyashanti.
Awakening, at least initially, is often a kind of transcending of the human dimension of being. Body, mind, ego—all of that is transcended. And that’s necessary, because it’s not our egos that wake up. We have to be able to sort of leave them behind. But also, we do have a body and a mind and a human life that’s in time and space, and it’s always in a process of becoming.
To our ego mind it’s hard to imagine “becoming” that has no search for completion in it, no sense of angst or unworthiness. But it’s actually happening all around us. Everything in nature is in the process of becoming, but it’s not in a rush to get there. When a pine tree is a seed, in a certain sense it’s complete. It contains the entire pine tree within the seed. In fact, in a way, it contains all pine trees within the seed. It’s totally complete; nothing is left out....
Awakening, at least initially, is often a kind of transcending of the human dimension of being. Body, mind, ego—all of that is transcended. And that’s necessary, because it’s not our egos that wake up. We have to be able to sort of leave them behind. But also, we do have a body and a mind and a human life that’s in time and space, and it’s always in a process of becoming.
To our ego mind it’s hard to imagine “becoming” that has no search for completion in it, no sense of angst or unworthiness. But it’s actually happening all around us. Everything in nature is in the process of becoming, but it’s not in a rush to get there. When a pine tree is a seed, in a certain sense it’s complete. It contains the entire pine tree within the seed. In fact, in a way, it contains all pine trees within the seed. It’s totally complete; nothing is left out. The potentials for roots and trunks and branches and pine needles are all present. A hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall pine tree is innate in a single little seed.
If that seed had its own version of a spiritual awakening, it would feel that completeness, that it didn’t have to become anything other than it was. That’s a huge thing for a human being to experience. Simultaneously, if the conditions are right, the seed starts to sprout and put down roots. It grows a trunk and stretches out its branches and needles to the sun, and basically unfolds its potential. Through the whole life of the tree, it’s endlessly unfolding its potential, until its life is exhausted and it becomes fertilizer for the next seed.
That’s one of the examples I like to use where you can actually have both of these things happening: always unfolding your potential and always unfolding your completion, once we realize what’s always and already whole. And it’s not just a personal thing. It’s not the ego that has that realization; it’s true nature as such, so it’s the true nature of all beings and all things. As it is said that the Buddha proclaimed when he awoke, “I and all beings everywhere have simultaneously realized the great liberation.”
Of course, if he was saying that from the ego perspective or even the rational perspective, it makes no sense. Just because this guy Buddha sitting under the tree had his great enlightenment doesn’t mean that somebody around the corner all of a sudden popped into enlightenment also. But the true nature of me is the true nature of you, and the true nature of you is the true nature of the universe. And when true nature awakens through an individual expression, it’s true nature as such that awakens. So that’s the feeling, and that’s important, because it’s not only important for us to discover our wholeness and completion, but that we also perceive it in others. If it’s a real realization, it will be true nature that’s awake—not “my” true nature, in terms of just me. It has that quality, too, because there’s still an individual there in a certain sense. But the gift has to be seen everywhere.
Seeing the true nature of everyone and everything is an immensely beautiful thing to behold, and wonderfully confounding when you behold the true nature of somebody or something you really don’t like. “Really? Wow!” It doesn’t mean that you suddenly agree with the person you dislike. You can still disagree, but it’s different to disagree and just see your version of their wrongness, or disagree and see that they are also an expression of true nature—potentially a conscious one, potentially an unconscious one.
Even though it’s just mere understanding, it’s kind of nice every once in a while to remind yourself that you can’t be other than you are, and there’s completion from the very beginning. Even when we’re confused and searching and struggling, that’s also true nature. That’s like the seed sprouting and pushing away the grains of soil as it makes its way to the surface sunlight. You can feel that pushing through happening sometimes; that itself is an expression of true nature. So the yearning and the search is an expression of true nature. And it’s not a bad thing to contemplate, especially if you’re having a difficult time. You don’t somehow stop becoming what you really are when you’re struggling.
It all starts from the simplest standpoint, the simplest thing. As I say, often when it comes to your spiritual practice, whatever that is, the simpler and more one-pointed the better. The usefulness of an application is how much can be condensed into its most simple form. It’s like a physicist trying to come up with an equation that takes the greatest amount of information and condenses it into the most simple expression possible. That was the genius of E=mc2. The amount of information that it contained was almost unimaginable, as well as its beauty. Certainly for someone like Einstein this was clearly a big part of his motivation. Such discoveries were mathematical and spiritual discoveries at the same time.
So when you condense the immensity of true nature down into a really simple application, you want something that contains as much wisdom and vision and love as possible in its most simplified, practical form. Often I’ll say simply, “Abide as awareness.” Just that. Keep it simple.
From Adyashanti's Mount Madonna Retreat, 2019
© Adyashanti 2019
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...
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
An Unfinished Poem by Adyashanti
Listen now, or lose your life, for what I have to say is what you have imagined in quiet moments but have failed to realize in full. Perhaps you were too timid or astonished at the critical moments, or couldn’t find the courage to step through the veil of your frail life when the door was opened for you.
Or perhaps you wanted to keep your life as your own, and chose to hold onto a few pennies when you could have had gold. No matter, for yesterday has passed into the dust of remembered dreams, and tomorrow’s story is yet to be written.
Which is precisely why you and I are now here together. You and I. You and I. Oh, the sheer mystery of it—how could anything be more grand? Stand with me here at the precipice and take my hand in yours, for I am good company to those ready to depart familiar ground. If not, then let loose of my hand now and take that...
An Unfinished Poem by Adyashanti
Listen now, or lose your life, for what I have to say is what you have imagined in quiet moments but have failed to realize in full. Perhaps you were too timid or astonished at the critical moments, or couldn’t find the courage to step through the veil of your frail life when the door was opened for you.
Or perhaps you wanted to keep your life as your own, and chose to hold onto a few pennies when you could have had gold. No matter, for yesterday has passed into the dust of remembered dreams, and tomorrow’s story is yet to be written.
Which is precisely why you and I are now here together. You and I. You and I. Oh, the sheer mystery of it—how could anything be more grand? Stand with me here at the precipice and take my hand in yours, for I am good company to those ready to depart familiar ground. If not, then let loose of my hand now and take that of a more familiar companion. For where we stand is known, but our next step will not be—nor the one after or the one after that.
So shoulder all of your longing and intent and leave all else behind. I give you fair warning: The world you are about to leave will not be there when you return. For nothing truly left behind is ever the same upon our return. Let us not waste any more time on discussions or debates; you have surely been caught in those tide pools too long already. Too much talk is wearying to the soul and evades the spirit of things. Longing is the true measure of a man or woman and alone has the power to draw us out of ourselves and into the vast air of eternity. But we shall not rely only on the winds of longing, for they can be fickle and unpredictable. We shall also need the fire of intent—that fine-tipped arrow of courage flying true and straight to its goal, piercing through the fabric of our dreams as it goes.
This is as fair a day as any to begin the journey back to your origin. So lift your foot together with mine and we will step off the well-trodden paths and into the uncharted woods where the essence of things lies waiting for you to open your eyes.
It is time to begin watching your steps, dear companion. For you have already wasted the goodness of too many days stumbling along with the unconscious drove. Today I bid you to place no foot upon the earth without feeling the sinews, skin, and bone of your feet with each step. How awake you are to the least of things will determine how awake you become to the greatest in due time. For in the play of time, the great and manifold diversity of things in the end proves their unity. And it is toward the end that we are headed, for it is only by means of the end that we arrive here, on this spot, free and immortal.
I can see in your eyes a fear and confusion. All this talk of endings brings a tremble to your bones. But fear not, for I do not speak of death or chaos except to point out that you have already fallen prey to both. No, I talk of awakening from the death of sleepwalking in dreams and veiled imagination. Beyond the veil all is well, and more well than I can attest. Within the immortality of what you are, there is a contentment and peace born only of your true identity.
Have you not been told how grand you are, how uncontained, how limitless? I for one maintain that you are as unseen and eternal as the space that spans beyond the myriad universes. I praise the immortal self—not one self among many, but the self within all selves. For everywhere I go, and in each and everyone I meet, I greet my secret and unseen self. For I know each man and each woman as I know myself, none greater or lesser in essence or worth.
I have no desire or pull toward the gods, nor sacred relics, nor holy books. For I have waded through the various dogmas and found them lacking the essential vision, the unitary glance that reveals God’s hand within every gesture. Why should we go looking for more than we are, when we are what we are looking for? Beware of a misguided longing, for it leads in the end to brutality. How much blood has already been spilled in God’s name and how much more to come?
I bid you, dear companion: Throw off the yoke of belief, for to arrive at the nobility of truth you must be cleansed of all borrowed knowledge till you are as innocent as the day before you were born. You must forge from within your longing a fiery sword of discrimination, unsheathed from the past—starting now on this hill we stand upon, determined to never again take anything secondhand, but instead prove true or false each statement yourself.
For truth belongs to neither man or woman, nor holy book, nor well-reasoned philosophy or belief, but only to itself—immortal and pure. I seek only to remove untruth from your mind so that you may be restored to the unitary vision which is your everlasting inheritance.
© 2006 by Adyashanti.
Inexplicably it comes. When you least expect it. For a reason you can never know. One moment you are striving, figuring, imagining, and then, in the blink of an eye, it all disappears. The struggle disappears. The striving disappears. The person disappears. The world disappears. Everything disappears, and the person is like a pinpoint of light, just receding until it disappears. And there’s nobody there to witness it. The person is gone. Only, only awareness remains. Nothing else. No one to be aware. Nothing to be aware of. Only that remains itself. Then it’s understood, finally and simply.
Then everything—all the struggle, all the striving, all the thinking, all the figuring, all the surrendering, all the letting go, all the grabbing hold of, all the praying, all the begging, all the cursing, too—was just a distraction. And only then is it seen that the person was, is, and ever will be no...
Inexplicably it comes. When you least expect it. For a reason you can never know. One moment you are striving, figuring, imagining, and then, in the blink of an eye, it all disappears. The struggle disappears. The striving disappears. The person disappears. The world disappears. Everything disappears, and the person is like a pinpoint of light, just receding until it disappears. And there’s nobody there to witness it. The person is gone. Only, only awareness remains. Nothing else. No one to be aware. Nothing to be aware of. Only that remains itself. Then it’s understood, finally and simply.
Then everything—all the struggle, all the striving, all the thinking, all the figuring, all the surrendering, all the letting go, all the grabbing hold of, all the praying, all the begging, all the cursing, too—was just a distraction. And only then is it seen that the person was, is, and ever will be no more than a thought. With a single thought, the person seems to reemerge. With more thoughts, the world seems to reemerge right out of nothing. But now you know.
The incarnation is nothing more than a thought. A thousand incarnations are but a thousand thoughts. And this amazing miracle of a mirage we call the world reappears as it was before, but now you know. That’s why you usually have a good laugh, because you realize that all your struggles were made up. You conjured them up out of nothing—with a thought that was linked to another thought, that was then believed, that linked to another thought that was then believed. But never could it have been true, not for a second could it have actually existed. Not ever could you have actually suffered for a reason that was true—only through an imagination, good, bad, indifferent. The intricacies of spiritual philosophy and theologies are just a thought within Emptiness.
And so at times we talk, and I pretend to take your struggles seriously, just as I pretended to take my own seriously. You may pretend to take your own struggles seriously from time to time, and although we pretend, we really shouldn’t forget that we are pretending, that we are making up the content of our experience; we are making up the little dramas of our lives. We are making up whether we need to hold on or surrender or figure it out or pray to God or be purified or have karma cleansed—it’s all a thought. We just collude in this ridiculous charade of an illusion pretending that it’s real, only to reveal that it’s not. There is no karma. There is nothing really to purify. There’s no problem. There is only what you create and believe to be so. And if you like it that way, have at it!
But we cannot continue this absolute farce indefinitely. We cannot continue to pretend this game we play, indefinitely. It’s impossible. Everything comes back to nothing.
And then it’s a bit harder to hold a straight face consistently for the rest of your life.
Transcribed from a talk in Pacific Grove, CA, June 9, 2006.
© 2006 by Adyashanti.
Look around you; there is only one reality. The reason that you are here, wherever here is for you, is because it is the only place that you can be right now. But even though reality is right here, and even though there is quite literally nothing but reality, it is very possible for you to miss it altogether. By miss it I mean to imagine that reality is something or somewhere other than here. As strange as it may sound it is very possible, even probable, that even though you have eyes to see, you do not see. And even though you have ears to hear, you do not hear. What you see and hear is not exactly what is actually here, but what you imagine is here.
Our imagination is a very powerful force in determining what we perceive. If we imagine that the world is teeming with evil forces, we will surely perceive the world as evil. But if we imagine the world to be essentially good, we will perceive it as good....
Look around you; there is only one reality. The reason that you are here, wherever here is for you, is because it is the only place that you can be right now. But even though reality is right here, and even though there is quite literally nothing but reality, it is very possible for you to miss it altogether. By miss it I mean to imagine that reality is something or somewhere other than here. As strange as it may sound it is very possible, even probable, that even though you have eyes to see, you do not see. And even though you have ears to hear, you do not hear. What you see and hear is not exactly what is actually here, but what you imagine is here.
Our imagination is a very powerful force in determining what we perceive. If we imagine that the world is teeming with evil forces, we will surely perceive the world as evil. But if we imagine the world to be essentially good, we will perceive it as good. Either way it is the same world that we are looking at. But the world is neither good nor bad in and of itself; it is simply what it is. And if we see the world as either good or bad, we will not be able to see it as it actually is. We will only be able to see it as we imagine it to be.
Now take this idea and apply it to everything and everyone in your life. Try it for a moment, or an hour, or a day. And if you do, you may begin to notice that the world you imagine to exist does not exist at all. This may cause you some fear, or possibly the thrill of discovery, but either way the important thing is to get some distance from the habitual way the mind contorts and creates perception.
But even though our mind imagines the world and everything in it to be other than the way it actually is, the reality of existence remains eternally untouched by our misperception of it. This is both relatively good and bad. It is good in that existence is eternally what it is. We need not worry about reality becoming something other than reality. But it is bad in the sense that the world we imagine to exist is always colliding with the world as it actually is. This collision is the cause of immense human suffering and conflict.
So we are trapped within our illusions and misperceptions. And the greatest illusion of all is to believe that we are not trapped. But even when we realize that we are confined within a prison of our own making, we are trapped because all the ways we struggle to get out of our illusions are illusions themselves. So, yes, we are trapped, and helpless to boot.
But there is a very strange thing that can occur at exactly the point where you realize that there is no escaping the imaginary world of your illusions. You bare your heart open to illusion, surrender your eternal struggle against it, and admit to being bound by its cunning imagination. I don’t mean that you become despondent or resigned to your fate. I mean that you truly let go in the face of your utter defeat and stop struggling.
And when all the struggle ceases, we realize that the prison of our mind cannot hold us in anymore, because the prison was all along something we imagined into existence. And imagined things aren’t real, they don’t exist. But we could never really see this as long as we were fighting the phantoms of our minds. We needed the one thing that our imaginary minds could not bring about, could not fake or create: the genuine surrender of all struggle.
In the blink of an eye, we are no longer confined within illusion nor our attempt to avoid illusion. When all struggle ceases, there is nothing to bind us to a distorted perception of existence and we can finally see. What we see is that we do not simply exist within existence, but all of existence exists within us as well. And although everywhere we look we see the endless diversity of life, we also now see our own true face in everything under the sun.
© Adyashanti 2010
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...
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
Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there’s nothing there to grab hold of.
The Unknown is more vast, more open, more peaceful, and more freeing than you ever imagined it would be. If you don’t experience it that way, it means you're not resting there; you’re still trying to know. That will cause you to suffer because you’re choosing security over Freedom. When you rest deeply in the Unknown without trying to escape, your experience becomes very vast....
Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there’s nothing there to grab hold of.
The Unknown is more vast, more open, more peaceful, and more freeing than you ever imagined it would be. If you don’t experience it that way, it means you're not resting there; you’re still trying to know. That will cause you to suffer because you’re choosing security over Freedom. When you rest deeply in the Unknown without trying to escape, your experience becomes very vast. As the experience of the Unknown deepens, your boundaries begin to dissolve. You realize, not just intellectually but on a deep level, that you have no idea who or what you are. A few minutes ago, you knew who you were—you had a history and a personality—but from this place of not knowing, you question all of that.
Liberated people live in the Unknown and understand that the only reason they know what they are is because they rest in the Unknown moment by moment without defining who they are with the mind. You can imagine how easy it is to get caught in the concept of the Unknown and seek that instead of the Truth. If you seek the concept, you'll never be free, but if you stop looking to myths and concepts and become more interested in the Unknown than in what you know, the door will be flung open. Until then, it will remain closed.
I’ve seen people who have never meditated come to satsang and have a deep experience of the Unknown, and I've known many who remain in the trance because they stay with the mind's techniques and strategies. There is no prerequisite for experiencing the Unknown. Everyone has equal access to it.
© Adyashanti 2002. All rights reserved.
Excerpted from “Full Circle Enlightenment,”
December 5, 2019 ~ Pacific Grove, CA
We have a certain idea of causality: “This happened because of that.” Or “I am the way I am because I was born in this particular family, in this particular culture, and raised in this particular way.” That does have a reality. It’s only an infinitesimally small part of the picture, but it’s the way we tend to live life.
We have this view of how things are caused—the reason anything is the way it is. Take a grain of sand, for example. Conventionally we’d say a grain of sand is there because ocean waves stir up the water, bash against rocks or rub against them at the bottom of the ocean, and particles collide. Occasionally little particles break off and wash up on the shore, and then you have sand. That’s all well and good; there’s...
Excerpted from “Full Circle Enlightenment,”
December 5, 2019 ~ Pacific Grove, CA
We have a certain idea of causality: “This happened because of that.” Or “I am the way I am because I was born in this particular family, in this particular culture, and raised in this particular way.” That does have a reality. It’s only an infinitesimally small part of the picture, but it’s the way we tend to live life.
We have this view of how things are caused—the reason anything is the way it is. Take a grain of sand, for example. Conventionally we’d say a grain of sand is there because ocean waves stir up the water, bash against rocks or rub against them at the bottom of the ocean, and particles collide. Occasionally little particles break off and wash up on the shore, and then you have sand. That’s all well and good; there’s obviously a truthfulness to it. But that hardly tells the story.
What does it take for there to be a grain of sand? It takes an earth. It takes colliding tectonic plates, currents, water, wind, exploding stars to make little hurling rocks like earth go into space, and huge suns for them to orbit around and be warm enough so life can form. All of those things depend on other things to exist. It would be an infinite regress to connect all the dots, but basically, without an entire cosmos, there would not be a single grain of sand. So our conventional idea that “this causes that” is rather silly. Actually, the cause of any one event is every other thing that has ever happened throughout all of space and time. Some of the effects are so subtle, so slight, so infinitesimal, that one could not possibly measure them or track them.
This is what interconnectedness really means. It’s not a fanciful spiritual idea. Even people who believe in interconnectedness usually think of it within certain narrow confines. They fail to get the immensity of the interconnectedness of existence. This is part of what spiritual practice is meant to help open our minds to. It doesn’t actually matter beforehand whether you believe it or don’t believe it. It’s best to live as a living, breathing question mark until something is extraordinarily clear.
It also takes a cosmos to create a single human being. Literally every moment is the product, the outcome, of an infinite variety of causes and effects throughout all of space and time. This moment is the outcome of innumerable, untraceable influences. The way that everything “inter-is” is unfathomable. When you really see this, it’s an immense thing to take in, to understand with your blood, bones, and marrow, not just your mind. It’s the release of a tremendous amount of energy. It certainly changes the way one sees the world, oneself, and each other. Then mountains and rivers are no longer mountains and rivers. A mountain includes all of space and time—each thing does, actually—a river, a squirrel scampering across the forest floor, whatever it is. Then our own idea of ourselves as something separate is toast. It cannot survive that seeing.
In spirituality, often there is a suggestion that we look for or come to our truer identity, a truer sense of being. Maybe all of a sudden one day there’s a shift, and we sense ourselves to be something more like awareness. It’s much, much freer to be awareness, to be consciousness, than to be some little idea floating around in consciousness. It’s more expansive. It’s generally filled with more positive feeling. We may think, “Ok, that’s it. I’ve got this whole thing nailed down. I’ve come to a preferable identity now.” That’s good—I’m not discounting that. But there’s more to the story than that.
“The interconnectedness thing” does away with so much blame: “Why did you do that to me?” “Because of everything that ever happened in all of existence.” That’s on a cosmic level. On a human level, even if you know that, it’s entirely appropriate to say, “I’m sorry for doing that to you.” You and I are not isolated pieces—we’re the happening of all that interconnectedness. That opens up an immense number of possibilities and ups the scale of responsibility immensely.
In the end, it’s as if you have one foot in eternity and the other foot in the relative world. In eternity it’s all connected sameness and it’s perfect, even with all of its absolute horror and disaster, as well as its beauty. There’s something that is perfect about it—not as a philosophical statement, but as an experience of being. We think of the Absolute as the unchanging, the undying, the unborn. I call it the domain of pure potentiality at the Ground of being. It’s true and it’s real.
The other side of the Absolute is that this is it, showing up like this. Therefore you, me, the world, and all that’s happening here takes on cosmic value, an infinite significance and unimaginable value in each being. A theistic way of saying that is not to believe, or hope, or anticipate, but to actually see that everything is the face of God. What happens if you really see that? How are you going to move in a world where everything is God? Where sometimes God is clear and sometimes God is confused? Sometimes God shows up in an infinite variety of ways.
Then that true nature has awoken in the human domain. Now mountains are mountains again and rivers are rivers, and they are not—they’re both. It’s like coming full circle. You’re back in ordinary life, right where you started. But of course, the journey changes the experience of it. Now ordinary life and the face of God are the same thing. The whole idea is to be unlimited. It means you can experience yourself as pure consciousness, and you can experience yourself to be an ordinary little sentient being. You can experience yourself to be the totality, and you can experience yourself to be a part of it. But you don’t have to only experience yourself as part, or the totality, or pure consciousness. You can experience yourself as all that at the same time. That’s really the most beautiful thing, when that within us which tries to fixate—“I am this as opposed to that”—when there is no more this and that. You aren’t limited anymore. That’s the freedom where nothing is left out.
© Adyashanti 2019
A participant writes: I am a 56-year-old black woman, and a particular feeling of unworthiness appears in the form of internalized “racism.” It is often/mostly subtle these days.
For example, going into predominantly “white” spaces and relationships (which in the Pacific Northwest is pretty much everywhere), I find myself going out of my way to present myself as nonthreatening to make others feel comfortable with my presence.
You spoke about unconscious choices in the exercise. I don’t know how to look at this because in some way it feels like “whiteness” and “otherness” in the form of culture, institutions, and people are to blame for this particular feeling of unworthiness.
Adyashanti: Thank you for your question. It brings to mind an incident I had many years ago in my early twenties. I was...
A participant writes: I am a 56-year-old black woman, and a particular feeling of unworthiness appears in the form of internalized “racism.” It is often/mostly subtle these days.
For example, going into predominantly “white” spaces and relationships (which in the Pacific Northwest is pretty much everywhere), I find myself going out of my way to present myself as nonthreatening to make others feel comfortable with my presence.
You spoke about unconscious choices in the exercise. I don’t know how to look at this because in some way it feels like “whiteness” and “otherness” in the form of culture, institutions, and people are to blame for this particular feeling of unworthiness.
Adyashanti: Thank you for your question. It brings to mind an incident I had many years ago in my early twenties. I was traveling out of town with a friend of mine to compete in a bicycle race. Late at night we pulled into a roadside motel hoping to get a room. I went in and booked a room from an elderly white woman who was working at the desk. Just as I was about to leave, my friend came in and asked if I was able to book a room. As soon as the woman behind the desk saw that my friend was African American she suddenly looked very disturbed and claimed that she had made a mistake with the booking. She claimed that actually there were no rooms available and tore up the paperwork that I had just given her.
I was so shocked and dumbfounded that I didn’t know how to respond. It was the first time that I had encountered such overt racism first hand. It was deeply disturbing. We ended up leaving and driving to another motel where we booked a room without incident. I was enraged at the woman’s racist behavior and when I talked to my friend about what had happened, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “When you’re black you encounter this sort of behavior all the time. It’s part of what it is to be black in this culture.” I wanted to go back and confront the woman, but my friend convinced me to let it go and go to bed -- we did, after all, have to get up early the next morning to drive out to the race. This was my first personal encounter with a form of overt racism that shook me to my core.
I can only dimly imagine what it is like to be so defined by the color of one’s skin and the effect that has on one’s sense of self-worth. To internalize such a painful and destructive cultural shadow is painful indeed. It does however seem as though anyone’s experience of unworthiness, whatever the color of their skin, begins in great part as an internalization of outward influences that are sustained by identifying with the images in one’s own mind of an unworthy self. In this sense, at least, we are dealing with a universal phenomena of incorrect self-identification.
If in fact our true identity originated in some outer influence, we would all be destined to be unavoidably impoverished by the limitations of perspective and love of those around us. Fortunately this is not the case. And because this is not the case, it is up to each of us to seize upon the fierce power of discernment and love, and begin to bear the dark light of our solitude where we encounter the unformed nature of our presence. For as long as we choose to remain defined by either inner or outer images, no matter what our race, upbringing, or gender, we end up only imprisoning ourselves within the profound limitations of our own internalized self-image.
That is why it is up to us, and only us, to cast aside everything that is false, painful, and limiting, by facing into the profound mystery of our being. We must take that one profound step beyond everything that we think we are (no matter where it came from), begin to face the formlessness of our presence, and open once again to the invisible and silent ground of our being. It is there that all of our masks will be stripped away by the great impenetrable silence, if only we can bear its voiceless command to surrender all that we know of ourselves and embrace the benevolent light of our unborn nature. We must throw out of our consciousness everything that is not essentially our own, by being absolutely willing to be a light unto ourselves where we -- not someone or something else — encounter the fullness of our nothingness.
Then, and only then, can we embody the fullness of our own skin, and be a clear and benevolent presence in this often confused world. Then we in our humanity embody the sanity, freedom, and love that is the only hope for humankind, and can consciously and lovingly participate in the outer work of healing the cultural wounds of racism (and all forms of division) that distort the indistinct unity of our shared human and spiritual nature.
Excerpted from Adyashanti's “The Way of Liberating Insight” Online Course Q&A
© Adyashanti 2015
There is a wonderful story about a young man who checks into the monastery, full of juice and ready to be enlightened yesterday. He asks the abbot, “How long will it take me to be enlightened?” To which the abbot answers, “About ten years.” The young man says, “Ten years! Why ten years?” The abbot replies, “Oh, twenty years in your case.” The man asks, “Why do you say twenty years?” The abbot says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was mistaken . . . thirty years.”
If you really get it, you realize that to even ask the question gets you ten years. As soon as the thought, “When will I really be free?” comes up, time has just birthed itself into existence. And with this birth of time you have to think, “Probably at least ten years, maybe forever.” Where can you go in order to get here? Any step takes you somewhere...
There is a wonderful story about a young man who checks into the monastery, full of juice and ready to be enlightened yesterday. He asks the abbot, “How long will it take me to be enlightened?” To which the abbot answers, “About ten years.” The young man says, “Ten years! Why ten years?” The abbot replies, “Oh, twenty years in your case.” The man asks, “Why do you say twenty years?” The abbot says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was mistaken . . . thirty years.”
If you really get it, you realize that to even ask the question gets you ten years. As soon as the thought, “When will I really be free?” comes up, time has just birthed itself into existence. And with this birth of time you have to think, “Probably at least ten years, maybe forever.” Where can you go in order to get here? Any step takes you somewhere else.
This is surprising to the mind because the mind always thinks of freedom, or enlightenment, as some sort of accumulation, and of course there is nothing to accumulate. It’s about realizing what you are, what you have always been. This realization is outside of time because it’s now or never.
As soon as your idea of enlightenment becomes time-bound, it’s always about the next moment. You may have a deep spiritual experience and then ask, "How long will I sustain this experience?" As long as you insist on the question, you remain time-bound. If you are still interested in time and the spiritual accumulations you can have in time, you will get a time-bound experience. The mind is acting as if what you are looking for isn’t already present right now. Now is outside of time. There is no time, and the paradox is that the only thing that keeps you from seeing the eternal is that your mind is stuck in time. So you miss what’s actually here.
Have you ever felt that you really didn’t like being here very much and that you wanted some wonderful eternal experience? That’s what is often thought but not said when the teacher says, “Be here right now.” Inside you are feeling, “I am here, and I don’t like being here. I want to be there, where enlightenment is.” If you have a really true teacher, you will be told that you are mistaken, that you have never been here. You’ve always been in time, therefore, you have never actually shown up here. Your body was here, but the rest of you went somewhere else.
Your body has been going through this thing called “life,” but your head has been going through this thing called “my fantasy about life” or “my big story about life.” You have been caught in an interpretation about life, so you have never really been here.
Here is the Promised Land. The eternal is here. Have you ever noticed that you have never left here, except in your mind? When you remember the past, you are not actually in the past. Your remembering is happening here. When you think about the future, that future projection is completely here. And when you get to the future, it’s here. It’s no longer the future.
To be here, all you have to do is let go of who you think you are. That’s all! And then you realize, “I’m here.” Here is where thoughts aren’t believed. Every time you come here, you are nothing. Radiantly nothing. Absolutely and eternally zero. Emptiness that is awake. Emptiness that is full. Emptiness that is everything.
© Adyashanti 2006.
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