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Excerpted from “The Origin of Everything,”
May 2, 2020 ~ San Jose, CA

There is an incredible spontaneity at the core of all of our experience that we don’t often notice. When we pay deep attention—the heart of real spiritual contemplative practice is paying attention—our thoughts just seem to appear, even the thoughts we have about ourselves, as well as other beings and the world.

We have no consciousness of how we’re beating our heart or exactly how we’re breathing. We don’t have to remember to digest our food well. All that is programmed into our biology, and it’s happening without our conscious knowing of it. What we know is just what breaches the barrier between the unconscious and the conscious. As soon as something from the unconscious breaches the barrier, all of a sudden we’re conscious of it—we recognize the thought.

Everything appears to simply happen, but it’s not as happenstance as that. There is an incredible complexity and intelligence operating underneath it all. Let’s just call it the totality for the sake of the moment—the essential, the essence of us, the essence of this moment. The conscious experiences are the tip of the iceberg, the part of the totality which is right now breaking through that barrier of unconsciousness and becoming conscious. So right now, the totality is there. It’s functioning. We’re aware of whatever part of the totality that has become conscious. A very important part of spirituality is widening that domain of what we’re conscious of, what we’re actually aware of.

There is a kind of realization, a shift of identification, where we experience our self to be the totality. We experience our self to be the very origin, and yet that doesn’t mean that we are suddenly conscious of the infinite interconnections that bring even one moment of experience into being. Those interconnections are too vast. They’re seemingly infinite in a world where everything is connected to everything else. Everything is part of what’s creating every other moment. No mind could track all of those interrelationships happening simultaneously. So even when we experience our self to be the totality in our essence, we’re still struck by the utter and amazing spontaneity of that totality.

Though it sounds quite paradoxical, any movement is actually the movement of stillness. Stillness produces the movement, the movement happens within stillness, and then the movement is resolved in stillness. In a similar way, the words I’m speaking are the origin and then are the totality of consciousness. They come out of that consciousness. They’re an expression of that consciousness.

Many great spiritual teachings and realizers have talked about how in our essence, the unknown is a way of trying to articulate the experience of the totality. Even the totality isn’t tracking every single interconnection every instant. It is being all of that. It is being That.

The potential sacred function of a teaching is to evoke something living in you, something beyond the teaching, something beyond the teacher, something that is a living part of you, a beautiful part of you, a part of us. We start to bring a greater consciousness to bear upon any moment, maybe every moment. We notice a commonality to anything that evokes the sacred—whether it’s a spiritual teaching or a great piece of art, or music, or a walk in nature—which is artistic beyond imagination. The natural world is the greatest work of art that we will ever see or participate in, where we are literally walking, living, and breathing in an unimaginably creative expression of being.

The element that lights it all up, that opens everything up, is our consciousness. It allows us to have the eyes to see the divinity of it all, even in the midst of everything that life is—including the tragedy, the difficulty, and all the negative parts. We don’t need to deny any aspect of existence in order to find this divinity.

Our consciousness, our awareness, has the capacity to see beyond the surface of things. It’s not an abstracted idea of some cosmic eyeball that’s looking at everything. But all of a sudden, our whole body-mind is part of the functioning of consciousness. We don’t just see our environment; we actually sense it, too. We feel it.

Our whole body-minds are actually a sort of sensory organ of the infinite, of true nature. Admittedly, most people do not utilize it that way, because it takes such attention and sensitivity to begin to do so. But nonetheless, this body-mind consciousness is a way that life or the cosmos experiences itself—and that’s extraordinary. Without a body or mind or consciousness to experience itself, the universe would have absolutely no experience of itself whatsoever. In one sense, it wouldn’t exist if it’s not experienced at all.

In spiritual teachings we’re encouraged to wake up from these bodies and minds, to break our identification with them, which is extremely useful and even necessary if we want to have the deepest realization of our true nature, and yet what we’re essentially doing is just breaking the restricted identification with them. That has nothing to do with the usefulness of this incredible organic mechanism of the body, the physical body, the subtle body. This is something of extraordinary value, because through this we are having our experience of life. This is how life is experiencing itself.

© Adyashanti 2020

Life without a reason, a purpose, a position . . . the mind is frightened of this because then “my life” is over with, and life lives itself and moves from itself in a totally different dimension. This way of living is just life moving. That’s all.

As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to change, that’s unreality. Life doesn’t need to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. Life doesn’t need to know the “right” way to go because it’s going there anyway. Then you start to get a hint of why the mind, in a deep sense of liberation, tends to get very quiet. It doesn’t have its job anymore. It has its usefulness, but it doesn’t have its full-time occupation of sustaining an intricately fabricated house of cards.

This stillness of awareness is all there is. It’s all one. This awareness and life are one thing, one movement, one happening, in this moment—unfolding without reason, without goal, without direction. The ultimate state is ever present and always now. The only thing that makes it difficult to find that state and remain in that state is people wanting to retain their position in space and time. “I want to know where I’m going. I want to know if I’ve arrived. I want to know who to love and hate. I want to know. I don't really want to be; I want to know. Isn’t enlightenment the ultimate state of knowing?” No. It’s the ultimate state of being. The price is knowing.

This is the beautiful thing about the truth: ever-present, always here, totally free, given freely. It’s already there. That which is ever-presently awake is free, free for the “being.” But the only way that there’s total and final absolute homecoming is when the humanness presents itself with the same unconditionality. Every time a human being touches into that unconditionality, it’s such peace and fulfillment.

In your humanity, there’s the natural expression of joy and love and compassion and caring and total unattachment. Those qualities instantly transmute into humanness when you touch into emptiness. Emptiness becomes love. That’s the human experience of emptiness, that source, that ever-present awakeness. For the humanness to lay itself down—your mind, your body, your hopes, your dreams, everything—to lay itself down in the same unconditional manner in which awareness is ever present, only then is there the direct experience of unity, that you and the highest truth are really one thing. It expresses itself through your humanity, through openness, through love. The divine becomes human and the human becomes divine—not in any “high and mighty” sense, but just in the sense of reality. That’s the way it is.

The only price is all of our positions. The only price is that you stop paying a price.

© 2004 Adyashanti.

When you read a novel, and you read about various characters, you may like some and not like others. Or when you watch a movie, think about your relationship with the characters. You might like them; you might not like them—but you’re not finding your sense of self in them. You’re not referencing your self-worth by the characters in a novel or when you turn on the TV. You just have your thoughts about them.

But imagine if you turned on your TV or you read a novel and you actually completely derived your sense of being and your sense of self from one of the characters. Immediately your perspective is very different, isn’t it? Now your perspective has gone from something that’s very vast to something that’s very limited, seen only through the eyes of the character. Sadly, that’s how most human beings spend their lives. They have this little character in their mind called “me,” and they’re actually viewing that “me” as personal when it’s not.

The “me” is very impersonal, not meaning cold or distant, but just meaning without inherent self nature, in the same way that when you read a book, the characters are without self nature. They actually don’t exist outside of your imagination. They don’t even exist in the book, because the book is just words. And without someone reading the words and bringing it all alive within imagination, nothing even exists on the printed page. It’s all within the reader, all the life.

When the Buddha talked about the realization of no-self, he was talking about the self that’s an image in the mind being completely seen through. And when there is no image of self, experience has nothing to bounce off of. Everything just is as it is, because there's no secondary interpretation. The one that’s interpreting is the one that’s in pain. And that’s the one who suffers. That’s the one who causes others to suffer.

The false self, the self that’s an image in the mind, uses every experience to measure itself: “How am I in relationship to what’s happening? Am I wise? Am I stupid? Am I clumsy? Am I courageous? Am I enlightened about this?” That’s the movement of consciousness reflecting on an image of itself that doesn’t actually exist. It’s always measuring each and every experience, and then believing in the interpretation of the experience rather than seeing “Everything just is.”

Everything actually just is. From the perspective of consciousness, even resistance just is. And if you resist resistance, that’s just what is. You can’t get away from it. You start to see that the only thing that goes into resistance, a story, or an interpretation of what is—whatever it is—is this mind-created persona. It's like a character in a novel. When you read a novel, every character has a point of view. It has beliefs. It has opinions. There’s something that makes it distinct from other characters. Our persona is literally this mind-created character that’s always making itself distinct. So it always needs to evaluate everything against its preconceived idea.

There’s another vantage point. The other vantage point is not only outside the character, it's also inside the character. It’s the ultimate vantage point that’s outside, and it’s also playing all the parts from the inside.

That’s basically what it means to really wake up: we’re waking up from the character. You don’t have to destroy the character called “me” to wake up from it. In fact, trying to destroy the character makes it very hard to wake up. Because what’s trying to destroy the character? The character. What’s judging the character? The character.

So you leave the character alone. The character called you, just leave it alone. Then it’s much easier for the awakening out of that perspective to happen.

You don’t lose the character; you just gain the whole novel of life. It’s not like you lose anything. You just gain the whole book. You gain the whole universe. As Buddha would say, “Lose yourself, gain the universe.” It’s not a bad deal. Or Dogen: “To know yourself is to forget yourself, and to forget yourself is to be enlightened by the 10,000 things,” which means to see yourself everywhere. Wake up from your character, and then you see your self nature in all characters—not just one, but all of them.

So we don’t lose anything. We gain all characters. We just lose the fixation, that’s all.

Excerpted from Palo Alto Meeting, 6-22-05

© 2005 Adyashanti

Spirituality is about waking up, reaching in, finding, and identifying the things that are unconscious within you—things that you don’t want to see or deal with. If you want to come even close to enlightenment, you don’t get to hide from anything. You have that unquenchable thirst for truth and love, and you will look into anything in order to bring truth to it, in order to bring non-separation to it. There’s no hiding. No form of self-deception will work. All along the way, it requires this willingness to access your experience of where you are and what’s happening, and to make the necessary adjustments.

This is one thing that no spiritual teacher can give their students—they can’t give this kind of desire—the desire for the truth and nothing but the truth, all the way through, come what may. You either have it, or you find it, or you don’t. You can’t be in any kind of wish-fulfillment strategy with your enlightenment.

If we really want to live an awakened life, we’ve got to approach it in a very pragmatic way: What’s working? What’s not working? One of the illusions we let go of is just sitting around hoping and dreaming. This is a kind of resistance.

Just open your eyes and open your heart and encounter whatever is there. See what’s under it, and see what’s under that, and see what’s under that—until you see it all the way through. If you have that as a high value, then as far as enlightenment is concerned, you have the necessary and most important ingredient.

From Adyashanti's broadcast The Miracle of Any Moment, December 2017

© Adyashanti 2017

Excerpted from Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic, published by Sounds True

The Meaning of the Virgin Birth

Theologically, the story of the virgin birth suggests that Jesus descended down to earth from a heavenly state. What is the heavenly state? It is a state that is outside of time. It is a breaking through into eternity. Now, you may have experienced moments up something akin to the heavenly state. There are moments in life when, spontaneously, a door in your consciousness opens and suddenly you see everything from a very different perspective. The doors of perception open and life suddenly takes on the sense of tremendous meaning, even if you can’t communicate what that meaning is. The heavenly state is the context of eternity in which the world resides.

Each human being experiences such moments, in which the doors of eternity part—if only a crack—and you were filled with a sense of awe and joy. When you connect with the infinite mystery of being, you sense the immensity of the potential that’s within it. So this descent from the heavenly state into the world of time and space is very much tied to these moments where our perception opens and we are connected with the transcendent reality.

In the Jesus story, the virgin birth is that moment when the door cracks open and the spirit of Jesus comes down from the eternal. We should always remember that Jesus represents eternal being, that dimension of our own being that is beyond time and space, beyond what we can see and think about and touch. From that perspective, what does it mean that Jesus descends straight from heaven? This is eternal, divine being breaking through the latticework of time—breaking through the structures of our minds, breaking through our belief systems and entering into our consciousness.

Now, Jesus is born of a virgin. What does this virgin birth represent? This image is telling us that Jesus is not born of the pairs of opposites. His is a birth straight from heaven, and heaven is eternal wholeness. The virgin birth of Jesus represents heaven taking physical form here on earth. The birth of your physical form is the product of your mother and father, which are the pairs of opposites. But your deeper nature is eternal and not born from the pairs of opposites. It is timeless, and it is birthed into time and space as soon as you have a human incarnation. So there you are, a human being filled with the mystery of eternal being, filled with the radiance of spirit.

This is what the virgin birth signifies: time and space being opened up and eternity being embodied as a human being. This is you and I, yet we don’t know it. We are eternal, divine beings manifested here and now in our humanity as a particular human being. Our human form comes from the pairs of opposites. The body that feels, the mind that thinks all this comes from the pairs of opposites. Your mother and father got together and produced a baby, a beautiful, incarnated being, and that being is filled and animated by the vitality of divine being. That is the beauty of what the virgin birth signifies if you can read the metaphor.

© Adyashanti 2020

Excerpted from “The Intangible Quality of Being,”
February 12, 2020 ~ San Jose, CA

At the heart of your experience of being right now, there’s an attentiveness—there’s consciousness, and it’s innate. The idea of “you” or “me” being the one who is conscious, that’s an afterthought. It doesn’t exist until we conjure it into being in our minds. If we don’t conjure it into being, or if we just withhold conjuring into being someone who’s attentive, then we can actually come into immediacy, which is an understanding of what it is to be mindful—to be deeply grounded in immediacy. And that’s not quite as simple as people generally think, because “immediate” is before you can think a single thought about it. If you think a thought about it, it’s not immediate anymore—it’s already in the past.

“Immediate” also doesn’t mean you have to stop quickly and try to immediately get hold of something, or otherwise you’re going to lose the immediacy of the moment. The immediacy is also the timeless Now. Immediacy is timeless. It’s not something that lasts for the shortest possible amount of time.

Have you ever noticed there is no succession of “now” moments? There isn’t a now, followed by another now, followed by another now, that you’ve got to grab hold of so you can be in the now moment. By the time you’ve grabbed the now moment, it’s not now anymore, it’s the next moment. That’s not really an accurate understanding of Now. The Now is timeless, and timelessness isn’t like a spiritual fantasy or an image of timelessness. Timelessness is concretely what it says it is—no time.

Everything that ever occurs happens in this timeless Now. Thirty thousand years ago was the timeless Now. Thirty thousand years hence will be the timeless Now. This moment right now is the timeless Now. There’s something about it that’s quite literally timeless. It’s just the open field of Now.

Even the feeling sense of the passage of time is completely subjective. There’s no dependable sense of time going by. Sometimes a 30-minute meditation can seem to stretch out for hours. Or you might have a meditation where it seems like only a couple of moments have gone by and the bell rings, and it’s been 30 or 40 minutes. To the extent you’re totally absorbed in doing something, time goes by very quickly. When you’re doing something you really don’t want to be doing, and you’re not absorbed, time seems to crawl. But that has nothing to do with the Now. Now is timeless. Now doesn’t last any amount of time.

The timeless isn’t something “out there.” It’s the immediate moment experienced from the deepest, most fundamental dimension of being. The most fundamental dimension of being is timeless. It’s a domain of being where it feels like nothing ever happened, because it’s existing in the timeless Now, and so it’s free from time, even as another part of your being can very much experience the passage of time.

The timeless dimension of our being isn’t about having a timeless experience and leaving it at that. We’re talking about the very Ground of being, that from which all other experiences of being issue forth. They all arise from that timeless Ground, immense with potential, because in the end it’s responsible for the entire experience of being. Just think of how multi-layered and complex your experience of being has been throughout your entire life, including all of your perceptions and things you’ve seen, tasted, touched, felt, and all of that issuing forth from this Ground that seems at first to be quite nothing. I suppose that’s why we human beings look past it for so long.

We need to see even spiritual awakening outside of the context that it’s often talked about in terms of just moments—“a revelatory moment when I had an awakening.” That’s important, but we have to see it in a bigger context because that’s not all there is to it. You can say, “Oh, I had that revelatory moment, so I guess I’m awake,” but awakening is only meaningful in any given moment. In any moment, we’re either awake or asleep, and in that moment, it doesn’t care if we were awake yesterday, or a year ago, or even a second ago. What’s relevant now is “How awake am I in this moment?” That’s the only thing that’s really relevant.

The Now isn’t a moment. It’s a timeless happening, and there’s a dimension of spiritual awakening that isn’t defined as a moment. It doesn’t really have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s far, far deeper than that.

© Adyashanti 2020

In essence the entire spiritual endeavor is a very simple thing: Spirituality is essentially about awakening as the intuitive awareness of unity and dissolving our attachment to egoic consciousness. By saying that spirituality is a very simple thing, I do not mean to imply that it is either an easy or difficult endeavor. For some it may be very easy, while for others it may be more difficult. There are many factors and influences that play a role in one’s awakening to the greater reality, but the greatest factors by far are one’s sincerity, one-pointedness, and courage.

Sincerity is a word that I often use in teaching to convey the importance of being rooted in the qualities of honesty, authenticity, and genuineness. There can be nothing phony or contrived in our motivations if we are to fully awaken to our natural and integral state of unified awareness. While teachings and teachers can point us inward to “the peace beyond all understanding,” it is always along the thread of our inner sincerity, or lack thereof, that we will travel. For the ego is clever and artful in the ways of deception, and only the honesty and genuineness of our ineffable being are beyond its influence. At each step and with each breath we are given the option of acting and responding, both inwardly and outwardly, from the conditioning of egoic consciousness which values control and separation above all else, or from the intuitive awareness of unity which resides in the inner silence of our being.

Without sincerity it is so very easy for even the greatest spiritual teachings to become little more than playthings of the mind. In our fast-moving world of quick fixes, big promises, and short attention spans, it is easy to remain on a very surface level of consciousness without even knowing it. While the awakened state is ever present and closer than your feet, hands, or eyes, it cannot be approached in a casual or insincere fashion. There is a reason that seekers the world over are instructed to remove their shoes and quiet their voices before entering into sacred spaces. The message being conveyed is that one’s ego must be “taken off and quieted” before access to the divine is granted. All of our ego’s attempts to control, demand, and plead with reality have no influence on it other than to make life more conflicted and difficult. But an open mind and sincere heart have the power to grant us access to realizing what has always been present all along.

When people asked the great Indian sage Nisargadatta what he thought was the most important quality to have in order to awaken, he would say “earnestness.” When you are earnest, you are both sincere and one-pointed; to be one-pointed means to keep your attention on one thing. I have found that the most challenging thing for most spiritual seekers to do is to stay focused on one thing for very long. The mind jumps around with its concerns and questions from moment to moment. Rarely does it stay with one question long enough to penetrate it deeply. In spirituality it is very important not to let the egoic mind keep jumping from one concern to the next like an untrained dog. Remember, awakening is about realizing your true nature and dissolving all attachment to egoic consciousness.

My grandmother who passed away a few years ago used to say to me jokingly, “Getting old is not for wimps.” She was well aware of the challenges of an aging body, and while she never complained or felt any pity for herself, she knew firsthand that aging had its challenges as well as its benefits. There was a courage within my grandmother that served her well as she approached the end of her life, and I am happy to say that when she passed, it was willingly and without fear. In a similar way the process of coming into a full and mature awakening requires courage, as not only our view of life but life itself transforms to align itself with the inner mystic vision. A sincere heart is a robust and courageous heart willing to let go in the face of the great unknown expanse of Being—an expanse which the egoic mind has no way of knowing or understanding.

When one’s awareness opens beyond the dream state of egoic consciousness to the infinite no-thing-ness of intuitive awareness, it is common for the ego to feel much fear and terror as this transition begins. While there is nothing to fear about our natural state of infinite Being, such a state is beyond the ego’s ability to understand, and as always, egos fear whatever they do not understand and cannot control. As soon as our identity leaves the ego realm and assumes its rightful place as the infinite no-thing-ness/every-thing-ness of awareness, all fear vanishes in the same manner as when we awaken from a bad dream. In the same manner in which my grandmother said, “Getting old is not for wimps,” it can also be said that making the transition from the dream state to the mature, awakened state requires courage.

Sincerity, one-pointedness, and courage are indispensable qualities in awakening from the dream state of ego to the peace and ease of awakened Being. All there is left to do is to live it. 

© Adyashanti 2008 

When the mind is free of all of its content, all of its conditioned thinking, it enters into the solitude of silence. That silence can only arise when one sees the limitations of one’s thinking. When one sees that his or her thoughts will not bring truth, peace, or freedom, there arises a natural state of silence and inner clarity. And in that silence there is a profound solitude, because one is not seeking a more advantageous relationship with thought or with the accompanying emotions that are derived by thought.

In that solitude all ideas and images are left behind, and we can intuitively orient ourselves toward the unborn and uncreated ground of being. In that ground we find our true being; and in the same manner in which our being is uncreated, it is also undying. Therefore, all that we will ever be or can be is found in our solitude (within ourselves) and is timelessly present in its fullness and completeness, now and eternally.

It is within our deepest solitude, where we take leave of every image and idea of ourselves as well as of God, that we come upon the fullness of our being. And in that fullness of being we recognize the divinity of all things and all beings, no matter how great or small. For divinity is not something earned or given, but lavishly present within all. To have the eyes to see the divinity of all beings is to bring light into this world.

So we are given this one small task: to cease being what we are not, and to be what we eternally are. Such a task would seem to be a gift of Love, but how often is it denied in favor of the blind security of conforming to the dictates of our fear and blame? If we would only see that all limitations are self-imposed and chosen out of fear, we would leap at once into the arms of grace, no matter how fierce that embrace might be.

It is Love that leads us beyond all fear and into the solitude of our being. There we find our utter aloneness because we stand free of all the false comforts of illusion and find the capacity to stand where no one else can stand for us. We are alone not because we have isolated ourselves behind an emotional defense or false transcendence, but because we are no longer held captive by either the mind or fear.

To stand alone in true solitude is to stand in the recognition of the absolute completeness and unity of all manner of existence. And from that common ground, where nothing and no one is foreign to you, your love extends across the magnitude of time and embraces the greatest and smallest of things.

© Adyashanti 2012 

Excerpted from “The Immensity of Self,” November 6, 2019 ~ San Jose, CA

What does it mean for the Self—something that’s unlimited, without borders or edges or boundaries—to be embodied in a particular human being? That would mean the human being would have a greater and greater capacity to embody this immensity. It doesn’t mean, however, that the human being is going to be particularly impressive. We always think of enlightened beings in some way as extraordinarily charismatic, glowing human beings. We think if the immensity is being embodied in a human being, it’s going to be so charismatically obvious that you would want to throw yourself at their feet in worship. But that’s not what it really means.  

The immensity of being can be deeply embodied in a very humble way, even a very ordinary way. It can be extraordinary and charismatic, but it can also be quite ordinary, something that most people might miss, yet it’s possible that for that being, the immensity of the Self is somehow embodied and expressing itself through them. Because the immensity of being can and does show up as this moment, without it being different or more extraordinary. 

There doesn’t seem to be an end to that which is without limit, the Self, to how fully and deeply the unlimited can embody itself and express itself in any human being. There doesn’t seem to be any end to it. How could there be an end to it if being embodied is without limit? This is why at a certain point, we may say, “Okay, this is a fully awakened being.” What does that mean—a human being where the infinite, the unlimited, is completely embodied in a limited human incarnation? How could that be?  

There doesn’t seem to be any end to how fully and deeply the Self can be embodied in any human being. At a certain point, the lines we think we’re going to cross and sort of graduate into full enlightenment seem to be what they actually are, which are creations of our egos. Because the ego often thinks in terms of accomplishment: “If I accomplish something—God-realization, enlightenment, full awakening or whatever it is—when I accomplish that, then I will have finally arrived, and then I’ll be okay, and I’ll be fully awake.” The whole thing is egocentric thinking to the extreme. 

When we look at it from the standpoint of the Self, if one can do that, then the whole thing is much more “low to the ground.” It’s the endless ways that the unlimited can show up without end: ordinary, extraordinary, everything in between. There’s no graduation. There’s no certificate. Only our egos like to think in terms of end points and graduations because egos want to accomplish things.  

This idea of accomplishment is brought into the spiritual realm, and if you’re not careful, you’re still trying to accomplish something. You’re still basically trying to become the person you think you should be. You’re trying to become a good little girl or boy, or the enlightened girl or boy, or whatever. This egoic idea of accomplishment can keep seeping into the spiritual impulse. That’s why the honed, practiced precision of discrimination becomes really handy. And the further you go with all of this, the more important it becomes, because the discriminations become more and more subtle, and the important things become easier to miss.  

That’s why it becomes more important to be able to make these subtle discriminations, like discriminating between how the ego relates to the spiritual impulse and how the Self relates to the spiritual impulse. The ego thinks of it as accomplishments and end points and arrivals, but the Self doesn’t look at it that way at all. All of that seems completely remote to the Self because the Self is not going anywhere. It’s not accomplishing anything because it’s not actually becoming more of itself through being totally Self-realized. It doesn’t gain anything. It doesn’t become more of what it already is. But it does become more and more capable of being embodied and expressed through a particular human life—and there’s no end to that. So finish lines and all of those ways of thinking have to be seen through.  

That doesn’t mean there aren’t different phases of awakening, different depths of awakening, because there are. The idea that all awakening is the same is ridiculous. Not all awakening is of the same depth. That can vary tremendously. But to touch a little reality is still to touch reality. We don’t want to underestimate the value of any degree of awakening. Any degree of awakening is actually extraordinary. It has an incredible value to it.  

Awakening is not extraordinary in the sense that it makes you extraordinary or me extraordinary. That would be just another egocentric orientation. But it’s extraordinary in the sense of the Self, through a particular human being, becoming conscious of itself and embodying itself without end. At some point, that “without end” is no longer resisted. It’s the beautiful thing about it all. “Without end” doesn’t mean you keep endlessly seeking for something more, different, or better. If we’ve had a real awakening, the idea of something more, different, or better doesn’t make any sense. Like I said, if you’ve touched upon reality, you’ve touched upon reality. It’s not about something more, better, or all of those egocentric evaluations. It’s just the endlessness, the unlimitedness, of the Self that you are.  

© Adyashanti 2019

Excerpted from “The Great Expanse of Darkness,” May 23, 2019 ~ Tahoe City, CA

The Sandokai is a fundamental scripture that is chanted in Zen monasteries and temples throughout the world. “San” means “many,” “do” means “sameness” or “oneness,” and “kai” means to shake hands, as in friendship. So, it’s the many things and the One in relationship, which is a way of depicting true nature, or reality. It was written by a Zen master, Sekito Kisen, in the eighth century.

One of the themes that runs through the Sandokai is the theme of light and dark. In the West, we have a relatively surface understanding of light and dark. The light is thought of as good, and the dark is bad or evil, but that’s not the way it is used in the Sandokai. Sekito uses the sense of the dark for the great reality, that great unknown terrain where all things are unified, where they all come together in a single source. And light is being used as the light of our consciousness, which sees differences. When you open your eyes, a tree looks different from a rock, and the sky looks different from the ground. It’s the light of consciousness that discriminates. Mostly the light forgets the dark and gets stuck in its immediate perceptions of difference. It loses the sense of the source, where all things come together.

When you’re paying deep attention, you see that the dark is a metaphor for quiet, the silence, or the great ground of being. You see that all things and all experiences arise out of that dark. A thought simply appears. A feeling simply appears. Where it appears from, you don’t know. It comes seemingly out of nowhere, the great expanse of pure unmanifest potentiality. When you’re just sitting there attending to your own experience, each moment of experience simply arises, and then it passes and disappears into the dark.

The wonderful thing about Sekito is that his vision, his enlightenment, went deep enough to not be attached to either the source—the One—or the many. Of course, whenever we see and experience an aspect, a facet, of the jewel of enlightenment, we’re touching upon the whole diamond. In just the same way, when we have a realization experience, some facet of reality is revealed to us, and each facet feels totally complete. We’re filled with a kind of confidence of that completeness. And yet, there are high-level delusions, even in deep states of realization, or enlightenment. It takes quite a bit of real vision to see that and not get hung up on some of the high-level delusions that are innate in various forms of awakening.

One of those high-level delusions is that, because each facet of reality feels so complete, we may not allow any other facets of reality into our view; we may think they’re simply illusions. When you have an experience of the One—the all-encompassing ground of being—the world of diversity can look, at least for a while, like a flimsy illusion. It’s easy to conclude that the source, the ground, is real but the rest isn’t. It is real, it is the ground, it is the fundamental source, but each distinct expression is also a complete expression of the source, and so each thing is itself the great totality.

In essence, as Sekito would remind us in his sutra, we live in two worlds. One is the sort of pinprick of the known terrain of our life. What our light of consciousness recognizes, sees, and imagines that it knows is this small terrain of life that’s illuminated by what we think we know. The other is the world of the absolute, that immensity of existence that lies outside of what we’re conscious of—that which is generating our experiences and also our thoughts that just come out of the dark.  

You can be sitting in meditation and all of a sudden you might feel like you’re encountering the dark, which often evokes a kind of fear. Whether the dark is of the exterior world or it’s the interior world, this is the terrain of our actual existence, of what we know and what we don’t know. It is the immensity of existence that is generating the life that we are conscious of. It can be generating your thoughts, your feelings, your reactions, and your dreams.

Where do your dreams come from at night? They come from this immense terrain of your unconscious, which seemingly knows no bounds. And that’s the culmination of the change to “I am not just what I think I am. The world is not what I think it is. It is not contained within the confines of the little piece of terrain that I’m conscious of, whether it’s what I think about myself, what I feel, what I imagine, my past, my history, or my hoped-for future.” All of a sudden you realize, “I’m not defined simply by this tiny terrain of the known. And the great expanse of the unknown is not some menacing, lurking danger outside of me. It’s actually simultaneously what I am—the totality of being itself.”

All revelation is born in the dark. When you let go of clutching onto the certainty of what you know and open your eyes like a newborn, as if for the very first time, you are surprised to find that the world you had imagined to be real was nothing more than a dream, one fabricated assumption after another. By stepping into the long-ignored silence of our aloneness and directing the light of our consciousness beyond the current frontier of our knowing, we allow the great unknown dimensions of life to find us and remain faithful to the work of our yearning.

© Adyashanti 2019

When we turn within, it’s not just as simple as “I turn within, I meditate and get a little calmer, I’m more mindful, and maybe I become less reactive. Maybe my heart is more available.” I don’t mean to devalue that because it’s a worthy thing. It even has a nobility—but not only so that we have more benevolent ideas and behave more compassionately. There is a more significant turning within. This turning within, in its deepest sense, is when we start to peer underneath our most fundamental ideas. And of course, the ideas that are most fundamental to us are our ideas about ourselves.  

We each come in with our own coloring of uniqueness. That’s the beauty of existence. That’s the energy of life expressing itself in all of its uniqueness and diversity while at the same time being life. But when something in us comes alive enough, we start to look underneath those ideas and have the associated feelings, because this isn’t all ideas. Some of the feelings have incredible emotional energy behind them. That’s a different matter. We tend to think of what’s real as what we think or feel, and if what we think and feel line up and are the same thing, that’s something that’s hard to see through—for any of us.

My mother used to say that when you go to a retreat it’s like going to a “Buddha boot camp,” because traditional Zen is very disciplined. I didn’t always like spiritual boot camp, but my intuition knew that it was pretty good for me, so I kept at it until I stopped chasing what somebody promised me or what I read in a book or heard in a talk. I started responding to the unique way that I was being called to that which I cared for deeply, even though I didn’t quite know what it was—a yearning to be in touch with the unique but very real and visceral quality of what motivated my spiritual life. That’s the call.

I realized that where I didn’t have it clearly defined in my mind, I had to go to its source, and we come back to this source—the generative source of being. That’s the discovery that’s there for all of us. And since it’s innate, it’s not necessarily like we earn it or deserve it. It’s perfectly virtuous trying to be a decent human being—decent human beings are nice to be around. They’re more benign. But there’s something more intrinsic even than that.

Yearning often feels like we’re yearning for something because we don’t have it—why would we yearn for something that we have? That we yearn for something we’re not conscious of doesn’t mean we don’t have it, and it doesn’t even mean we aren’t it in our deepest being. Things aren’t always as logically simple as we imagine. It’s useful at least to hold as a possibility that our yearning actually comes from a fullness that we may not be fully conscious of, that it may be coming from that which we are seeking. Often we can be yearning for something that somewhere inside us we don’t really believe could blossom in an ordinary human being. And what I’ve seen is when someone starts to let go of that idea, everything becomes possible for that person.

One day I saw myself sliding back down the trajectory of my yearning to where it came from. I traced it, not with my mind, but with my intuition and sense and feeling, and I sort of felt my way back into that place where it came from. The surprise of all surprises was that the yearning came from the fullness of what I was looking for.

There’s an idea in Zen that I didn’t understand for quite a while, which is that the yearning for enlightenment is the first arising of enlightenment in your experience. It’s like saying your yearning for God comes from God inside of you. It’s the first evidence of the divine presence in you. It doesn’t feel like it because it’s a yearning, but our spiritual yearning or orientation is the first evidence that our deepest and truest nature is breaking through into consciousness. Of course we don’t feel that when we first feel our yearning.

“I don’t know” becomes the doorway, whether it’s “I don’t know who I am” or “I don’t know who God is.” You don’t just think it, but you start to feel it, and you don’t push against it. You don’t grasp for more knowledge. You just let yourself not know, and feel it. It’s a relief when you’re not resisting it, like Ahh, I can breathe again! Sometimes it’s the time just to rest in that place, even before our questions. Questions are relevant, but sometimes it’s the time just to pay attention to that space, that consciousness that’s there before we ever have a question, and after we have a question. Then the trajectory of the spiritual instinct itself takes us that next little step.

Excerpted from Adyashanti’s London Meeting, August 18, 2019

© Adyashanti 2019