Excerpted from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life published by Sounds True.
Transformation tends to happen when we stop or something stops us—a tragedy, a difficulty—and we reassess and realize that the way we are going about life must be redefined. Sometimes we will need to redefine our whole identity. This does not just happen to spiritually advanced beings—this is human stuff. These moments occur with some regularity, and if we recognize how important they are, when they come, we can see them as both great challenges and great opportunities. How we respond is important. Do we search for a quick solution, for a quick answer, or for somebody to save us from our insecurity? Or do we find the wherewithal to settle into those moments and meet ourselves? We can lean forward into what is occurring, into the human experience or unresolved...
Excerpted from The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life published by Sounds True.
Transformation tends to happen when we stop or something stops us—a tragedy, a difficulty—and we reassess and realize that the way we are going about life must be redefined. Sometimes we will need to redefine our whole identity. This does not just happen to spiritually advanced beings—this is human stuff. These moments occur with some regularity, and if we recognize how important they are, when they come, we can see them as both great challenges and great opportunities. How we respond is important. Do we search for a quick solution, for a quick answer, or for somebody to save us from our insecurity? Or do we find the wherewithal to settle into those moments and meet ourselves? We can lean forward into what is occurring, into the human experience or unresolved quality—whether it is doubt, or fear, or hesitation, or indecision, or whatever our pattern is that causes us to not throw ourselves entirely into that moment.
We never know when these moments are coming. Some are big, and some are much smaller. We should not assume that the small moments are not as important as the big, obvious ones, because attending to the small moments is the way we build a capacity to attend to the big moments of crisis. It is the reason why most spiritual traditions have various ways of getting us to pay attention to our life, even when nothing significant seems to be going on. This comes from an acknowledgment, a realization that vital moments are current in our life and there are decisions being made—consciously or unconsciously—about how we are going to relate to them.
Do you relate to life as an unfolding mystery and an adventure of discovery? An encounter with your immense capacity for wisdom, love, and experiencing life with intimacy and vitality? We have extraordinary abilities as human beings when we begin to recognize the vitality of certain moments and we bring a consciousness to them. These vitality moments happen in our lives with great regularity and are opportunities for awakening and transformation. We must repeatedly embrace the insecurity of these moments and by doing so come to trust them and so ourselves. In these moments, all we need is knowledge of the next step and the willingness to take it. Paradoxically, the knowing of what the next step is arises when we have the capacity to rest in not knowing what the next step is and to recognize this is an intimate part of the process of transformation.
© Adyashanti & Sounds True 2019
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...
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 “Illuminating Presence,” August 14, 2019 ~ Woldingham, UK
Presence is a mysterious thing in a certain sense, at least when we reflect upon it. When we experience it, it’s not mysterious, but when we reflect upon it, it’s quite strange. We think of presence as a feeling, and in a sense it is a feeling, a tone—the way an environment feels, for instance. But it’s more than a feeling, especially when we start to awaken certain dimensions of presence within ourselves. Then it’s something that’s more immediate. The feeling is a byproduct, but the...
Excerpted from “Illuminating Presence,” August 14, 2019 ~ Woldingham, UK
Presence is a mysterious thing in a certain sense, at least when we reflect upon it. When we experience it, it’s not mysterious, but when we reflect upon it, it’s quite strange. We think of presence as a feeling, and in a sense it is a feeling, a tone—the way an environment feels, for instance. But it’s more than a feeling, especially when we start to awaken certain dimensions of presence within ourselves. Then it’s something that’s more immediate. The feeling is a byproduct, but the presence itself is experienced viscerally.
There are two fundamental dimensions of presence. One of them, you could say, is “presence as such.” You can walk into a church and feel the presence of a place of worship. When there has been deep and heartfelt worship or spiritual work going on, you can walk in the door and feel a kind of presence. You can also feel the presence in a negative sense. When something very violent has happened in an area or in a space, if you’re sensitive, you can pick it up. You can feel it in the atmosphere. It’s disquieting, though you may not know why you feel disturbed.
There’s a presence that we all share, a presence of true nature as such, and there’s also a kind of individual signature of presence. It’s almost like your personal essence or soul, as each person has their own quality of presence. There’s not just one quality—there are many facets of how presence can be experienced, and each person has a very distinct experience of presence. They may not be aware of it, but if you’re sensitive, you can sense their presence, whether they’re aware of it or not.
Presence is a doorway. It is the visceral experience of various facets of our true nature. Don’t just be aware like a cold spotlight of awareness. Get the sense of it, the feel of it, viscerally in your body. Feel it, even if it’s subtle. If you have an experience of spaciousness, feel it, sense it, because these things arise first as experiences that we are having, or “I” as a “me” am having. That’s often how we get the little hints of these experiences. The foretaste of presence can be like a vast space of awareness, or it can be experienced as a kind of compassion. In the West, the old word for compassion was agape, selfless love, a love that’s just there. It’s not “I love you,” it’s “loving what is” and having a tender feeling for all beings. That’s a kind of foretaste. By giving attention to these experiences, that distance can collapse or just simply merge, where all of a sudden it’s not “me” experiencing awareness, spaciousness, love, stillness, emptiness, solidity—in a positive sense, it’s “I am those qualities.” Those qualities are a dimension of being.
By sensing something, you’re actually drawing yourself close to it. It’s like the difference between “Oh, hi, how are you doing? I can see you over there.” There’s distance. And then you come a little closer. “Oh, hi, how are you doing, let me shake your hand. Now we’re a little closer. I can feel you a little bit.” And then, “Oh, how are you doing?” and you’re giving a big hug. Now your distance is closing. There’s still distance in the hug, but you’re closer, and the closer you get, the more you sense and feel. You might even feel more of the subtle body about them, but there’s still “you” and “them.” There’s the possibility that there’s actually something closer even than a hug, where you might recognize true nature in them. True nature is, in one sense, an insight, but it’s an insight that comes from a visceral, immediate experience. And that’s just how it is for these foretastes of presence—the spacious, unconditioned nature of awareness. It’s right there. Be close with it. Be intimate.
Entertain the possibility that your own direct experience, whatever it is at any given moment—positive, negative, wonderful, difficult—is not a mistake. It is the way. Showing up for it, whether it’s beautiful or challenging, that’s the way. Always running away from it and towards something else is just a delay. So, maybe we can, all of us, even if we feel like we know this very intimately and truly, even if we know it deeply and have experienced it, maybe we can have an even deeper trust in our own immediate experience.
© Adyashanti 2020
Excerpted from “Innate Knowledge of the Unknown,” November 2, 2019 ~ Oakland, CA
There is a power unlike any other power, force, or energy, when we’re connected deeply with the way our spiritual instinct communicates to us. You usually know it because there’s a kind of intensity about it. It’s an orientation—a spiritual instinct, you might say. When you get connected to how it’s speaking to you, and how you experience it without the veils of what we imagine it should be like, then we come upon a profoundly transformational energy.
There’s a way of listening to our spiritual instinct where we don’t leave ourselves in the listening. It’s to be connected or rooted in an intuitive way, into what’s often a very quiet dimension of being. We do need to stay rooted, but there are different ways of being rooted, of being...
Excerpted from “Innate Knowledge of the Unknown,” November 2, 2019 ~ Oakland, CA
There is a power unlike any other power, force, or energy, when we’re connected deeply with the way our spiritual instinct communicates to us. You usually know it because there’s a kind of intensity about it. It’s an orientation—a spiritual instinct, you might say. When you get connected to how it’s speaking to you, and how you experience it without the veils of what we imagine it should be like, then we come upon a profoundly transformational energy.
There’s a way of listening to our spiritual instinct where we don’t leave ourselves in the listening. It’s to be connected or rooted in an intuitive way, into what’s often a very quiet dimension of being. We do need to stay rooted, but there are different ways of being rooted, of being connected. There’s being connected in a way that’s rigid—“My way or the highway”—being so rooted that one is rigid and can’t actually let anything in. A lot of people, when they’re open and they start to listen deeply, stop being deeply rooted and connected within themselves; they’re listening in an abstract way. And then there’s a way of being connected that’s very fluid and dynamic, where we’re actually rooted but open.
In order to come upon that which is really uniting, we just relinquish our grasp. What we relinquish our grasp on isn’t as important—we could say “on everything.” When we start to relinquish our grasp on any particular point of view, what we start to come into as a living experience of being is a very intimate connection with what in spirituality is often called the Unknown. The Unknown is actually a bit more simple, approachable, and available than people think it is. We make some extraordinary fantasy out of the great Unknown, when at least to begin with, the Unknown is right underneath whatever we’re clinging to.
We cling to things in direct proportion to how much doubt they cover over. The things we hold most tightly, we hold tightly because they’re concealing doubt. If there was no doubt, why would anybody hold them tightly? You don’t hold tightly to the idea of being a human being, let’s say. Most people don’t clutch to that particularly tightly. To them it simply seems to be so obvious that they don’t need to clutch to it.
When we begin to open, we begin to experience this potentially wonderful domain of not knowing. If you want to be united really quickly, just come into the domain of not knowing. Or let’s just call it uncertainty: “Maybe I’m not so certain about the things I think I’m pretty certain about.” Maybe a different kind of energy gets in there, a different kind of curiosity: “I’m not so certain.” The Unknown is actually the absolute necessary ground from which to engage in any deep form of spirituality—without that, it’s just a bunch of ideas.
The beginning foundation—even if it doesn’t sound like a foundation—is actually the willingness not to know, or at least the willingness not to be certain. We start to hold things a little more loosely. When we start to hold things less tightly, the veils through which we tend to perceive things just naturally start to settle. If it doesn’t start with some visceral sense of not knowing, we’re not going to get very far.
In our culture, not knowing is not highly valued, but spiritually, it’s one of the highest values there is. When we open ourselves to the mystery of being, that’s always the doorway—whether it’s the mystery of who you are, the mystery of life, the mystery of God, or the mystery of somebody who’s had a kind of spiritual opening and they’re wondering how they can embody it and live from it.
If you’ve never experienced yourself as a living mystery, a mystery unto you, give it a try. It’s actually very pleasant. It’s not the resolution of the question, of course, but it’s much more liberating than someone’s idea of themselves.
The Unknown is the entryway, the doorway. We let ourselves be oriented to the mystery of being—not because it’s a kind of technique, but because until we’ve had any deeper awakening, we don’t actually know. That’s the truth of the matter: until we know, we don’t know. But the way to know is to allow yourself not to know. That’s the paradox.
© Adyashanti 2019
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...
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
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
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...
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
Excerpted from “The Awakened Connection to Soul,” February 8-9, 2020 ~ Portland, OR.
It’s not at all uncommon that people today feel some sense of disconnection from their soul. I use “soul” in the sense of our experience of meaningful depth, something that’s vital to us, even if we don’t think of it in a religious context. It’s like a source of meaning you can’t put into words, but you can feel it—especially when you lose it. Everybody knows the experience of becoming disconnected from the source of meaning and deep connection within themselves.
We’re living in a culture where people are suffering mightily because of the loss of their soul—not only individually, but also culturally as a whole. This is a part of modern life that we haven’t come to grips with. It’s one of the things that leads us to look for some...
Excerpted from “The Awakened Connection to Soul,” February 8-9, 2020 ~ Portland, OR.
It’s not at all uncommon that people today feel some sense of disconnection from their soul. I use “soul” in the sense of our experience of meaningful depth, something that’s vital to us, even if we don’t think of it in a religious context. It’s like a source of meaning you can’t put into words, but you can feel it—especially when you lose it. Everybody knows the experience of becoming disconnected from the source of meaning and deep connection within themselves.
We’re living in a culture where people are suffering mightily because of the loss of their soul—not only individually, but also culturally as a whole. This is a part of modern life that we haven’t come to grips with. It’s one of the things that leads us to look for some deeper connection, however we define that for ourselves. It could be meaning, it could be God, it could be awakening, it could be enlightenment, it could be peace, it could be love—all these are words that point to a certain kind of connectedness and sacredness inside.
All of the external means of entertaining ourselves and connecting us don’t really take the place of this inner connectedness. There doesn’t seem to be a technological stand-in for the soul, for that source of vital being and meaning that gives one’s life a sense of significance—not just in terms of accomplishment and what we can put on a resumé, but a much deeper sense of significance. A soulful significance.
Each of you has your own experience of how sacredness feels to you and when moments of sacredness have visited you. You’ve had those experiences, as hard as they are to explain or convey. You know the sense of words like vitality, source, meaning, and soul. These are all words that attempt to convey the actual human experience of the sacred, which is quite apart from the ideas of the sacred—although ideas, images, stories, and myths can all be part of transmitting a living sense of the sacred to us.
In spiritual awakening, we experience that the source of the sacred—the suchness of the sacred—is actually essentially ourselves. When we experience the sacred, we’re experiencing something true and profound about ourselves—if we understand the word “ourselves” in the biggest possible context. As a teacher, I think one of the things that is vitally important is to attempt to give people practical means to engage in this reconnection. Sometimes I’ll talk about this reconnection in the most essential possible way. Spiritual awakening, for instance, is one version of that, such as awakening revealing that the source of the experience of the sacred is not separate from your own innate self nature or true nature. At other times I’ll talk about the experience of soul connection. Whenever you experience a living sense of sacredness or timelessness, you are connecting with the soulfulness of your true nature. Our soul connection also gives us an intuitive sense of guidance. It is the inner teacher reorienting our attention away from the surface of things to their depth. And you don’t have to be spiritually awakened to have a connection to the soul—you just need to attentively and humbly listen to your silent depth. Your presence is deeper than your relative personhood.
It’s also important to have a sense of what it means to be connected in many small ways as well as noticing when you deviate from your soul—not according to an exterior standard, but according to your own inner and intuitive standard. Holding integrity with your soul is a profound, challenging, and wonderful practice. It’s essentially an inner listening and attuning to the presence of being. It’s choosing to live in one’s depth rather than in surface and conditioned mental and emotional reactivity. This is an essentially devotional orientation; it is more of the heart than of the head.
It would be extraordinarily arrogant of me to think that I know the means of your own connection to the sacred. My suggestion is to think of soulfulness as an instinct that even transcends spirituality per se—the instinct to connect, in great awe, with the mystery of existence. When I say “connect,” I’m talking about something visceral, not something abstract.
There are tiny moments throughout the day when we move away from embracing that which gives us the most vital experience of meaning there is. Every time we don’t listen to our depth, or inner presence, we take a little step away, but we can’t actually step out of our true nature even when it feels like we have. We cannot ever lose our true nature, because we are our true nature.
One of the most challenging things is to actually get all of ourselves, for a moment, into our immediate experience of being. We can think we’re being in our experience, but we’re generally running our experience through immense filters of assumption, judgment, and belief. Most people are not having direct experience that often—they are having experience distorted through innumerable mental filters. But when you see a thought simply as a thought, it becomes just part of the scenery and your attention can orient toward the awareness of the thought. This can break the trance of reactivity and open the heart to presence and clarity—a reconnection with the soulfulness of true nature.
When you look into a mirror, there’s an irreducible presence of being, a conscious intangibility, that can’t be reduced to the old memories, identities, and personality characteristics. This is where real spirituality begins—noticing that, encountering it, not even necessarily trying to understand it—and realizing that the same thing is looking through your eyes right now. It’s like an intangible presence, and the more you connect with that, the more your soul lights up and your heart opens. It’s a very simple, direct, and powerful practice.
© Adyashanti 2020
Excerpted from the book “Sacred Inquiry: Questions That Can Transform Your Life”
Life is an enigma spread across a landscape of nearly unimaginable unknowns. The immense terrain that even a single human life traverses is inconceivable. And yet here you are, right in the middle of navigating, and being navigated by, the great totality of life. This naturally and unavoidably gives rise to all manner of questions: Who am I? What is life? What is the meaning of life? What is the fundamental nature of reality? What is God, if there is a God? These existential questions live just below the surface of our painful habit of denying entry to the essential mystery of existence, and therefore subvert the one thing that has the capacity to transform human consciousness and unlock potential few dare to even imagine.
What makes sacred inquiry sacred? We can, after all, inquire simply as...
Excerpted from the book “Sacred Inquiry: Questions That Can Transform Your Life”
Life is an enigma spread across a landscape of nearly unimaginable unknowns. The immense terrain that even a single human life traverses is inconceivable. And yet here you are, right in the middle of navigating, and being navigated by, the great totality of life. This naturally and unavoidably gives rise to all manner of questions: Who am I? What is life? What is the meaning of life? What is the fundamental nature of reality? What is God, if there is a God? These existential questions live just below the surface of our painful habit of denying entry to the essential mystery of existence, and therefore subvert the one thing that has the capacity to transform human consciousness and unlock potential few dare to even imagine.
What makes sacred inquiry sacred? We can, after all, inquire simply as a means of gathering information, much like we do as schoolchildren. And while gathering and learning information is useful and even necessary, it is not a sacred act in and of itself. What makes inquiry sacred is that it is primarily a way of plunging consciousness into itself, into the hidden dimensions of the psyche which remain in darkness until we make an intentional effort to follow our questions beyond the periphery between the known and the infinite unknown. In sacred inquiry we are looking to evoke experiential insight and wisdom, not merely to collect more information or form yet more beliefs with which to delude ourselves.
Sacred inquiry is not simply about finding simplistic answers to life’s big questions; it is about transforming our consciousness so that we are living the answers, not simply knowing them as pieces of information. The state of our consciousness determines our entire experience of being, as well as what we are capable of knowing and perceiving. Sacred inquiry aims at the transformation of consciousness, for consciousness is perhaps the biggest mystery of all. And yet we take consciousness for granted, rarely stopping to notice or acknowledge, much less appreciate, that consciousness is the one indispensable ingredient in our entire experience of being. Contrary to our most basic human assumption, we are not human beings who possess consciousness—we are consciousness having a very human experience, with all the ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies that this entails. . . .
We are each an aperture through which the world knows and experiences itself. Each person embodies the infinite nature of life and consciousness within the finite form of their particular human life. Our questions are life’s questions, and our spiritual instinct toward connection and freedom are life’s deeper instincts. You and I, and the entirety of existence and beyond, comprise a single spectrum of being. This is to say that the words you, I, and existence refer to different perspectives within the totality of consciousness. And if conscious life is anything, it is naturally curious and questioning. Our questions—about ourselves and each other, about life and death, and about whether there is something that can rightly be called sacred—belong not only, or even primarily, to each of us. These questions belong to the immensity of life and the consciousness which we are each individual embodiments of. Your big life questions belong simultaneously to you and to the totality of existence functioning through and as you. The essence of your consciousness turns out to be the essence of all consciousness. . . .
We must be willing to suspend the compulsive drive of the ego for quick and convenient answers to our deepest questions and be willing to live in the creative tension between the known and the unknown. This creative tension, when deeply relaxed into, reveals itself to be the source energy of insight and revelation. As counterintuitive as it sounds, we come to greater insight by a willingness to not know—the greatest light is always found in the darkest region of our silent confusion. To sink all the way down into the unknown within you is the way to awaken the greatest leaps of insight and clarity.
© Adyashanti 2020
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
We Are the World, the World Is Us
Q: My question is regarding the welfare of all beings (or compassion) being a part of authentic spiritual impulse or the intention behind entering into spirituality.
My earlier spiritual training had a strong emphasis on service, and service as a path for realization. As I became more serious about spirituality, there was a strong urge to serve. But unknowingly, my ego took over and created an image of I have to serve. When I ventured into full-time service, my ego took a heavy beating, and I saw my whole image of I have to serve shatter in front of me. That was the point when I got introduced to your teachings, and it has helped me to lift myself up.
Based on what I understood from your teachings, the passion or desire for truth is the authentic spiritual impulse, and compassion, feeling for the welfare of the world, peace, etc.,...
We Are the World, the World Is Us
Q: My question is regarding the welfare of all beings (or compassion) being a part of authentic spiritual impulse or the intention behind entering into spirituality.
My earlier spiritual training had a strong emphasis on service, and service as a path for realization. As I became more serious about spirituality, there was a strong urge to serve. But unknowingly, my ego took over and created an image of I have to serve. When I ventured into full-time service, my ego took a heavy beating, and I saw my whole image of I have to serve shatter in front of me. That was the point when I got introduced to your teachings, and it has helped me to lift myself up.
Based on what I understood from your teachings, the passion or desire for truth is the authentic spiritual impulse, and compassion, feeling for the welfare of the world, peace, etc., would just be byproducts of the true realization. Now I am confused when you bring up compassion and the welfare of the world as part of the authentic spiritual impulse.
A: There is no way to separate truth from the welfare of all, since the revelation of truth reveals that we are the world, the world is us. The whole universe is contained within you. That is not just transcendent truth; it is also experienced as boundless love and compassion. What I’m getting at here is our spiritual motivation. Love for all is an aspect of our true being. If we do not access this, we remain essentially self-centered. Wisdom without love can be callous and harsh. Truth and love are simply two sides of the same coin—they cannot be separated.
I have met many people who have had a partial awakening. They realize some profound truth, but their heart is still essentially closed. They are half awake, and therefore essentially self-centered. This same phenomenon can happen when someone awakens to boundless love but not deep wisdom. Either way, it is like hopping around on one leg. I think it both wise and natural to include all beings within our spiritual motivations, as well as our more personal motivations.
Of course we can build more spiritual-appearing egos around the identity of being selfless and a servant of the good—such identities are as unreal as any other. Nonetheless, an altruistic attitude (without the accompanying ego identity) is conducive to realization and a benefit for all.
The Enlightened View
Q: I find it fairly easy to experience the extraordinary sacredness of the moment when drinking a cup of tea, to be aware of the inherent selflessness of myself when I am alone. The trouble happens when I am confronted with other people’s anger, or pain, or even violence. So many of us in this world live in unstable situations. How do we remain in the moment? How do we experience the extraordinariness of these moments? How do we continue to act from a place of stillness when we are in overwhelming situations occurring in objective reality? How do I act from grace when I see someone I love tangled in their own limiting beliefs? In these situations, I find it very difficult not to react in habitual, often traumatized ways.
A: This is a big and important question, and beyond my ability to answer in the space of an email. I will, however, attempt to make a start. Spirituality is, of course, about much more than having moments of sacredness when in supportive and non-challenging environments, as nice and as enriching as these moments can be. The “goal” (if I may use such a word) of spirituality is to be realized, clear, and fearless enough to meet and respond to the tremendous challenges of life from a revolutionary perspective.
Someone like Jesus had far from an easy life. It was not a life predominately defined by resting in the bliss of being, but of engaging with the sorrows of life from a revolutionary standpoint of wisdom, love, and fearlessness. Being rooted in what he called the kingdom, or the enlightened view, was not for him an end in itself, but rather an inner condition from which to engage with the challenges of life.
To embody any degree of realization requires us to uncover and expose those remaining mental and emotional fixations that inhibit the spontaneous movement of wisdom and love within our lives. For most, this is no small task. It all starts by taking full responsibility for our own inner and outer lives, and noticing the ways in which our own fear, judgment, resentment, and confusion cloud our ability to respond to the challenges of life in a wise and appropriate way.
It has been my observation that many people involved in spirituality are waiting for some great spiritual experience to make everything in their lives clear and solve all of their problems for them. This is a bit of an overstatement but not all that uncommon to varying degrees. Instead of trying to remain in a state of stillness, or peace, or any other state when dealing with the challenges of life, we are better served by seeking to act and respond with wisdom, clarity, and openheartedness.
I suppose that the most direct answer to your question is to go deeper and investigate the causes of fear, anger, jealousy, and control within yourself. Then you will find it more obvious how to respond to these qualities when dealing with others. There is simply no other option than to uproot the causes of human suffering within ourselves if we are to manifest the incredible potential for wisdom and love that lie at the core of our being.
You are the world, the world is you. Now let’s all act on it. And by doing so, we become more and more clear, more wise, and more loving. It is not always easy, but it is the only thing worth doing. And it’s up to each of us to do it.
Excerpted from Adya’s book, Sacred Inquiry
© Adyashanti 2020
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...
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
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