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What we think of as spirituality is not limited to what we think spirituality is. Spirituality is innate to being. It’s to be involved in the enigma of being. It’s to crack that nut, to open up that mystery. I think so much of deeper spirituality begins when we finally have the maturity, whether it comes at five years old or ninety-five years old, when we have whatever it is that causes us to recognize how deeply and profoundly we are a mystery unto ourselves. You have to have a little gap in your constant judging and condemning of yourself to feel the mystery of yourself. You have to suspend judgment for a moment. It’s a very unique and pivotal point in someone’s life. This is the contemplative endeavor. It’s diving into the mystery of being.

Meditation, whether it’s done in a meditation hall or while you’re sitting on a porch in your front yard, is actually entering experientially into that enigma of being—not just to think about it and philosophize about it, but to actually enter into it. It’s not very far to connect with the mystery of being. It’s right there under the surface. When I started to notice all of this in my twenties, it was a weird thing, because when you get involved with spirituality, you get all these ideas of what a spiritual person is, and I didn’t seem to fit the model. The model of a spiritual person didn’t seem to be a highly competitive athlete who would run over your grandmother to win the next race. That’s not in the sacred scriptures. Someone like that does not receive the deeper spiritual insights, you might think.

The nice thing is that when you’re young, sometimes you don’t even put spirituality in a category. It’s not spirituality, it’s just life. Sometimes life shows up in an odd way, and all of a sudden your experience of it is very different. Maybe you feel deeply connected, or you seem to disappear into nothingness, or you seem to have a moment of connection with God that’s unusually profound and touching and life changing. Or maybe you sink into some spontaneous samadhi where you lose all connection to your senses, and everything disappears, and you’re like a point of consciousness. There are many, many different ways that the deeper dimension of being shows up.

I think it’s useful to think of spirituality in the most natural possible terms. Spirituality is just natural to a human being. It’s even natural to atheists. If you could listen to scientist Carl Sagan in his mystical awe of the cosmos, it was like listening to a mystic half the time, in rapt awe of the beauty of existence. He was a scientific materialist, but that was his doorway into experience, connection, and awe. He was somebody who didn’t believe in God, but he had a deep experience. Clearly his investigations brought him into something akin to a kind of religious or spiritual awe.

I mention naturalness because the sense of the naturalness of true nature or awakening to true nature is not just religious, and it’s not just spiritual. You can even have atheists who are deeply participating in a way of being that connects them to a greater dimension of being. So clearly, this is something that’s innate in all of us. And if we would just go immediately to whatever our felt sense of our own mystery of being is, just to dip for a moment underneath the evaluations, the ideas, and the judgments of being, it doesn’t take much attention—a moment, really—to connect with the sense of being this extraordinary, conscious mystery.

Of course, we don’t want to just leave it at that. There’s something deeper in us that wants more than simply to leave it all as a mystery. I’m suggesting that that’s the entry point. If you forget that entry point, you can do decades of meditation looking for something that’s actually completely innate. And so in the old, universal teachings among the esoteric inner dimensions of most spiritualities, the suggestion is to just go into that place where everything is an unknown.

Open to the unknown. Experience the unknown. Just stop for a second. There’s so much about you that’s unknown to you, it’s mind-boggling. What is it that’s walking, living and breathing, wanting what you want and not wanting what you don’t want? What is it that wants God or awakening or enlightenment, or just a little more peace and happiness in a troubled life? Every time we say “I,” what do we actually mean? We’re giving voice to something that’s immense, and the capabilities are astonishing.

From The Quiet Dimension of Being
 
© Adyashanti 2019

Excerpted from Adyashanti’s book, The Direct Way

The profound, ungraspable, and invisible Ground of Being is attained by non-attainment, by letting go and letting be. Nothing is added to us; rather, we awaken to our always and already present Ground and source. This source is not apart from anything, and yet it is completely detached. As we connect to this Ground of Being, what we discover is our original innocence wherein every moment feels like a new creation, like something that has never been before.

Our Ground of Being is a timeless state. It is a dimension where the mind is emptied of content and renewed moment to moment. Therefore, such a mind dwells in innocence where the present is not filtered and interpreted through the past. The vast collection of human knowledge is available, if needed, but it is no longer a wall between you and what is, as it really is.

Therefore, from the Ground of Being each moment is experienced directly, with no distorting lens of past conditioning and no sense of time. Because it is a timeless state of only the eternal Now, the Ground of Being sees through the eyes of eternity and feels through the constant renewal of the senses. Each moment is as a birth moment, with all its innocence and wonder.

Practice Twenty

Feel into the silence of the lower belly that is prior to (yet all around) the mind. Notice that silence is the presence of absence.

Although there may be thoughts, the great silence is itself an absence of thought.

Although there may be feelings and sensations, the great silence is itself the absence of feeling and sensation.

Although there may be sounds, the great silence is itself an absence of sounds.

Notice that this absence, this emptiness, is full of presence, full of wonder and awe.

Let yourself intuitively sense the alive presence of this absence.

Do not be afraid, for this great absence is itself infinite potentiality. It is the true source of all.

Rest in this great womb of unknowingness until this unknowingness opens its eyes within you and as you.

Notice that in your Ground of Being you are the shining presence of this absence—absence of self, absence of other, absence of time, absence of sorrow, absence of anxiety.

Notice that this great absence is also total presence, total timeless freedom of Being.

Notice that when you look within yourself, you find that you are beyond nothingness and something-ness.

You are what the mind can never describe or imagine.

This itself is great liberation, a return to and rediscovery of innocence.

Rest in this freedom and ease.

© Adyashanti, Sounds True 2021

Our senses need to become refined, and the way our senses become refined is by starting to live through our senses again. It’s a great spiritual practice—a great human thing, but especially a great spiritual practice—to really be connected to your senses. You go outside and you actually feel the cold or the warmth on your skin. You don’t just take quick note of it and you’re off to the next abstract thought that flows through your brain, but you actually feel the cold or the warmth on your skin.

You really see what you’re looking at. You see it because you’re actually looking at it. We can have our eyes open but not really notice very much. You can look at something without having any of your senses online except vision. It’s almost like a computer looking around: “Okay, I’m taking it in—blue, white, ceiling, floor.” People live most of their life doing something like that. Or you can actually feel and sense what you see. Your sense of seeing and your sense of feeling are now operating in a kind of tandem.

It seems to me that either what evokes this noticing or what actually brings it into operation is the capacity of the heart to experience life in a tremendously deep and intimate way. Of course, it’s easier when you look at a tree or some flowers, something with some beauty to it. If you’re looking at them with any attention at all, you’ll realize it evokes a sense, a feeling. Your vision and the feel of something are operating in one moment. You’ve got at least two of your senses cooperating.

Actually, I think all of the senses are meant to work as a coherent whole. Their original way of operating is where you see and feel and hear and taste and touch things all at once, like the great composer who could not only hear music, but see music in his mind’s eye. How many people see music?

At any moment when all of our senses come together and really start to work as a coherent whole, when they’re all intermingled, they actually create another sense. That sense is what I’m calling the heart. All of a sudden, life is experienced in a very different way. As the great Zen Master Dogen said, “It is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.” It’s an interesting thing to be enlightened by the ten thousand things—meaning everything. It’s to be enlightened by what you see and hear and taste and touch and feel, to be enlightened by the world.

So this is the awakening of the heart. You can just do whatever you’re doing, look at whatever you’re looking at, and imagine that somehow there’s something in the heart that’s actually part of the process of what you see. You’re seeing from it. You’re looking from it. Immediately it will change your experience. It will become a more intimate experience of being. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing if you start to do it from the heart.

From Perceiving from the Heart, Oakland, CA, March 2018

© Adyashanti 2018

Strictly speaking, we can’t actually want what liberation is. We can’t want it because we can’t know it—we can’t project an idea onto it. You can’t describe it. I call it pure potentiality. That’s as close as I can get, because a big “void” experience is actually a projected idea of what pure potentiality is. That’s what I call eternity. Pure potentiality is complete nothingness. Because it’s pure and it hasn’t become form, it’s often thought of as a void, but not a void of emptiness because it’s also not spatial. All of our ideas of emptiness and void and big expanses of sky and space are not it either, because all of those are spatial references. It’s not in time and it’s not spatial, so you really can’t say anything about it. You’re stuck in a place of divine ignorance.

Some people have actually called it a state of divine ignorance because you can be something that you can’t know. Meister Eckhart sometimes called it “unknowing knowledge.” Unknowing knowledge is like when that immensity—not the “me,” but that immensity itself—has a recognition, “This is what I am.” But beyond that, it can never know itself more than that, because there’s no experiential quality to it. That’s why I say that the deepest impulse is paradoxically beyond rationality.

As I’ve seen over the years, many people have bumped up against this. They’ve had an experience, dipped their toe in, gone to the other side to some extent, and were pulled back. Usually it’s just an automatic response, a survival instinct. But I guess if you wanted to think of it as a benefit, the benefit is that the nonconceptual knot—the ultimate root of what both ego and self are—that knot lets go. And when that knot is even starting to let go, that’s when you feel like “I’ll be annihilated.” Because when that knot lets go, it’s not a knot anymore, and everything it’s ever known about itself was some version of contractedness. That knot, that contractedness, is just falling out of experience.

This knot lets go throughout one’s whole being, and a tremendous lack of self-consciousness is what comes along with it. You lose your inner world.

By inner world I simply mean that the gaze of consciousness or the gaze of awareness is trying to get us to pay attention. There’s part of consciousness that’s dedicated to what we’re doing, and then there’s a piece of it that is constantly doing a U-turn. It’s looking back inside. It’s always saying, “Well, how am I doing? How do I like this? How is this working out for me?” It’s the thing that refers back. The self is that contracted turn, and what it reflects back on is what we call ego.

So first you see through ego. And then you see through this self-turn. Then what’s inside when there’s no ego (if only temporarily), when it’s very mature, is a totally unified inner experience of being. When it goes to the ground of being, this arc straightens itself out, because what it was looking at is what falls away.

When it falls away, you’re no longer pulled, attracted, obsessed. The arc of consciousness straightens itself out, and then there’s just one thing going on all the time. Because the thing that we were turning in toward was produced by the imaginary qualities of self. We grow out of that just like we grow out of infancy. And when we grow out of that, it just falls away. As far as I can see, that’s why the Buddha used the word “nirvana,” which was like blowing out a candle flame. The definition of his enlightenment experience was something being blown out. It wasn’t the addition of anything, it was the subtraction. Something just stopped happening. And that’s what I call one’s inner world.

When consciousness is straightened out, it’s not like it’s no longer in touch with life—it’s just in touch completely directly. The intermediary falls away. There’s nothing to look at anymore and then you’re very in touch, actually. What you’re in touch with is fluid. There’s something extraordinarily affirmative and affirming about it. It’s far from negative.

Nobody even has to look for it. At some point you’ll start to be drawn in there. It can even happen to people who aren’t spiritual at all. Because in the end, we’re talking about the ground of our being. We’re talking about our truest and real nature. There’s always a thread that’s inclining you in that direction, even when you don’t know you’re being inclined in that direction.

Reality is reality in the sense that it’s not becoming. It’s not changing. In one sense, it’s not evolving. And at the same time, one’s human capacity to embody it is changing and evolving and growing without end. Because we’re actually embodying something that’s the infinite ground of our being, there’s no end to how deeply and fully it can be embodied. And that’s a continuous journey. Even Buddha is still becoming Buddha, but the difference is not becoming in the sense of looking for completion—just the adventure, the endless wondering, “How accurately can this be embodied?” And there’s no endpoint.

We get foretastes of it all along the way, those little moments when you bump into your own nothingness, when you can’t find yourself and yet there you are. There’s nothing to chase. And remember, it’s all good. It’s all natural. There’s really nothing to fear.

From Adyashanti’s Tahoe Retreat, May 2018

© Adyashanti 2018

The Way of Liberation is a stripped-down, practical guide to spiritual liberation, sometimes called awakening, enlightenment, self-realization, or simply seeing what is absolutely True. It is impossible to know what words like liberation or enlightenment mean until you realize them for yourself. This being so, it is of no use to speculate about what enlightenment is; in fact, doing so is a major hindrance to its unfolding. As a guiding principle, to progressively realize what is not absolutely True is of infinitely more value than speculating about what is.

Many people think that it is the function of a spiritual teaching to provide answers to life’s biggest questions, but actually the opposite is true. The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers. For it is your conscious and unconscious assumptions and beliefs that distort your perception and cause you to see separation and division where there is actually only unity and completeness.

The Reality that these teachings are pointing toward is not hidden, or secret, or far away. You cannot earn it, deserve it, or figure it out. At this very moment, Reality and completeness are in plain sight. In fact, the only thing there is to see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or feel, is Reality, or God if you like. Absolute completeness surrounds you wherever you go. So there is really no reason to bother yourself about it, except for the fact that we humans have long ago deceived ourselves into such a confined tangle of confusion and disarray that we scarcely even consider, much less experience for ourselves, the divinity within and all around us.

The Way of Liberation is a call to action; it is something you do. It is a doing that will undo you absolutely. If you do not do the teaching, if you do not study and apply it fearlessly, it cannot effect any transformation. The Way of Liberation is not a belief system; it is something to be put into practice. In this sense it is entirely practical.

To read this book as a spectator would be to miss the point. Being a spectator is easy and safe; being an active participant in your own awakening to Truth is neither easy nor safe. The way forward is unpredictable, the commitment absolute, the results not guaranteed. Did you really think that it could be any other way?

Excerpted from the Introduction of The Way of Liberation: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Adyashanti.

© Adyashanti 2012 

When we think of interrelatedness, we usually think of big or small things that are in relationship with one another. However, the way I’m using the word is not like that. I’m not denying that, but there is something deeper than that. Things are actually nothing but interrelatedness itself.

It’s really hard for a human mind to think that a thing could be nothing but interrelatedness, that interrelatedness itself ends up to be what things actually are. In this sense, things end up to be no-things, and no-things end up to be all things. So when we hear words like no-thing or nothingness, we shouldn’t try to understand that conventionally. In its truest sense, nothingness doesn’t have much to do with nothing. It has to do with interrelationship or interrelatedness.

And so it is with each of us. When you look inside for your true being, you might say, “Okay, exactly, precisely, what is this thing called ‘me’? What actually is it?” The more you look for it, the more you can’t find it. The reason you can’t find it is because it is nothing but interrelatedness. There’s no substance. There’s no thought, idea, or image to grasp. In that sense, it’s empty, but not empty in the sense of being nonexistent. It’s empty in the sense of being unexpected or inconceivable.

When you feel love or fall in love, that’s a very real feeling to you, and yet you can’t see it, you can’t weigh it; it doesn’t have any objective sort of existence. Nonetheless, we treat it as more real than the things we consider to be real—certainly as more important. Most people, if they feel love, their love feels more important to them than the solidity of their toaster. The love has no solidity to it at all. It has no objective tangibility to it, and yet, it’s something that one could orient their whole life around.

The Buddha used to talk about the thusness or suchness of each moment. It means not just each moment, but the thusness or suchness of each apparent thing that we perceive. So when I say being, this is the sense I’m using it in, a similar way that the Buddha used the thusness or suchness of something. When we perceive the thusness or suchness of something, we’re actually perceiving it as being nothing but interrelatedness itself. So this ordinary moment, with nothing particularly unusual about it, is being awareness, and awareness itself is interrelatedness. It’s not like interrelatedness is aware; it’s more like interrelatedness is. It’s not that the interrelatedness is that which is aware—it’s that the interrelatedness is awareness.

This is probably the fundamental barrier that any of us will bump into in spirituality: the barrier between awareness and the objects of awareness. The fundamental duality is that there is this world of things, and then there’s seeing and experiencing this world of things, and somehow those two are different. One of the great misunderstandings about unity is the belief that it reduces the world to a sort of homogenized “goo” of agreement. Actually, in some ways it’s almost the opposite. It frees the uniqueness in you, and it frees you to allow the uniqueness in others. Uniqueness flourishes when we see the unity of things. It doesn’t get flattened out—just the opposite. You just stop arguing with the difference that isn’t like yours.

When you have two viewpoints that are open to interrelating, almost always something will arise if you stick with it long enough, if you’re sincere, if you’re openhearted, if you actually want the truth more than you want to win or be right. Eventually something will bubble up from that engagement that’s truer than either one began with. If you have two people who are openhearted and see the truth and usefulness, even the utility, of really relating, they’ll see that, and both people walk away feeling like “Gosh, I feel good about that, like we both win because we both discovered more than we started with.”

The unity of things isn’t that there are no differences. It isn’t that a tree doesn’t look different than the sky, or behave differently than the sky, or have a different kind of life than the sky. The unity is that a tree—an object—is nothing but interrelatedness. The sky is nothing but interrelatedness, and the awareness of things is itself nothing but interrelatedness. That’s an explanation that is coming from a way of perceiving. That’s what enlightenment really is: seeing that the seeing and what one is aware of are one simultaneous arising. It’s an arising that’s always flowing because interrelatedness isn’t static—it’s ever flowing.

That’s why I’m always saying that this is really about a kind of vision, not in the sense of having visions, but the quality of our vision, the quality of our perception when we can perceive without the dualistic filter. What seems to be this impenetrable sort of barrier between us and things, us and the world, us and each other, is fundamentally between our consciousness and what consciousness is conscious of. That seemingly basic and immovable sense that there is a fundamental difference, a fundamental separation, is what’s really dispelled when our insight gets deep enough.

At the deepest level, the most fundamental level, interrelationship is just that—it’s interrelating. It’s not things interrelating. Things end up to be themselves interrelatedness. When vision becomes clear, that’s what we perceive. The world becomes not a world of things, but of interrelatedness.

Excerpted from “The World of Interrelatedness,” April 10, 2019 ~ Garrison, NY

© Adyashanti 2019

Let’s remember why we’re here at retreat: for this amazing opportunity to really look into the core of our own existence, the core of life itself that is so easy to overlook. It’s so easy not to pay attention to it, because it’s not noisy and it’s not clamoring for attention like all the other aspects of the human mind. Egoic consciousness is always pretending to be the most important thing that is happening.

And yet there’s this thread, this sense of something other than, deeper than, more real than, more essential than this scattered and divided noise that so many human beings live in, in their minds. And right in the midst of all that, there is a presence, there is an awareness, an unconditioned awareness, an unconditioned consciousness. Right in the middle of this conditioned mind, conditioned consciousness, is this shining, unconditioned essence. Essence doesn’t mean a little part hidden somewhere in us, the little teeny kernel of essence. Essence means the totality, the whole thing. Essence means the truth of you as opposed to the untruth of you.

Essence isn’t a small thing, essence is an immense thing. The essence of you is everything you ever see, taste, touch, and experience. Everywhere you go, every step you take, every breath you take is actually happening by the essence, of the essence, in the essence, and to the essence. All the rest is noise and chatter.

So we come here to give our attention, our affection, our time. Our most highly prized commodity is our time. Anything or anyone you give your time to shows immediately what is most important. And I want to remind everyone that what you really are, what the person next to you is, what the children in Africa scraping up the little grains of rice are, this timeless essence, is not hidden. It’s not hidden at all. It’s in plain view. Everywhere you look, that’s the essence. And the mind would say, “Where? Where? I don’t see it. All I see is a car, a billboard, a tree, the person in front of me, the funny man on the stage. Where is this essence?”

It’s easy to grasp for it, isn’t it? “Where is it? What is it? I want to understand it. I want to know about it. How can it work for me? How can I utilize it?” But it doesn’t come upon us through the grasping of it, through the striving for it, and through the struggling for it. There’s no merit gained through wasted effort, through excess struggle. There are no merit points for the people who drove themselves the craziest along the way to self-realization. For most people it’s so obscure that it seems very intuitive to grasp and to struggle instead of relaxing, not grasping, letting something come to you, letting the truth of your being reveal itself to you on its terms, in its way, letting it happen.

It will happen. It’s always happening. It’s always trying to show itself.

© Adyashanti 2008 

To discover our autonomy is the most challenging thing a human being can do. Because in order to discover our autonomy, we must be free from all external control or influence. This means that we must free our mind from all that it has collected, all that it clings to, all that it depends on. This begins by realizing that we are in a psychological prison created by our minds. Until we begin to realize how confined we are, we will not be able to find our way out. Neither will we find our way out by struggling against the confines we have inherited from our parents, society, and culture. It is only by beginning to examine and realize the falseness within our minds that we begin to awaken an intelligence that originates from beyond the realm of thinking.

If spirituality is to be meaningful, it must deliver us from all forms of dependence—including the dependence on spirituality—and help awaken within us that creative spark which all beings aspire to. For the culmination of spirituality lies not only in discovering our inherent unity and freedom, but also in opening the way for life to express itself through us in a unique and creative way. Such uniqueness and creativity is not to be found in anything the human mind has ever created, nor is it to be found in our ideals of human perfection or utopian dreams.

True autonomy arises when we have broken free of all the old structures, all psychological dependencies, and all fear. Only then can that which is truly unique and fearless arise within us and begin to express itself. Such expression cannot be planned or even imagined because it belongs to a dimension uninhibited by anything that has come before it. True autonomy is not trying to fit in or be understood, nor is it a revolt against anything. It is an uncaused phenomenon. Consciously or unconsciously all beings aspire to it, but very few find the courage to step into that infinity of aloneness.

© Adyashanti 2009

True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer. All methods aiming at achieving a certain state of mind are limited, impermanent, and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial awareness.

True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not being manipulated or controlled. When you first start to meditate, you notice that attention is often being held captive by focus on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets and tries to control what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning.

In true meditation all objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, or suppress any object of awareness. In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.

As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

SOME COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT MEDITATION

Q. It seems that the central instruction in True Meditation is simply to abide as silent, still awareness. However, I often find that I am caught in my mind. Is it OK to use a more directed meditation like following my breath, so that I have something to focus on that will help me to not get lost in my mind?

A. It is perfectly OK to use a more directed technique such as following your breath, or using a simple mantra or centering prayer, if you find that it helps you to not get lost in thought. But always be inclined toward less and less technique. Make time during each meditation period to simply rest as silent, still awareness. True Meditation is progressively letting go of the meditator without getting lost in thought.

Q. What should I do if an old painful memory arises during meditation?

A. Simply allow it to arise without resisting it or indulging in analyzing, judging, or denying it.

Q. When I meditate I sometimes experience a lot of fear. Sometimes it overwhelms me and I don’t know what to do.

A. It is useful when experiencing fear in meditation to anchor your attention in something very grounding, such as your breath or even the bottoms of your feet. But don’t fight against the fear because this will only increase it. Imagine that you are the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, or Christ in the desert, remaining perfectly still and unmoved by the body-mind’s nightmare. It may feel very real but it is really nothing more than a convincing illusion.

Q. What should I do when I get an insight or sudden understanding of a situation during meditation?

A. Simply receive what is given with gratitude, without holding onto anything. Trust that it will still be there when you need it.

Q. I find that my mind is spontaneously forming images, almost like a waking dream. Some of them I like, while others are just random and annoying. What should I do?

A. Focus attention on your breathing down in your belly. This will help you to not get lost in the images of the mind. Hold the simple intention to rest in the imageless, silent source prior to all images, thoughts, and ideas.

© 2011 by Adyashanti. All rights reserved.

Truth is only discovered in the moment.
There is no truth that can be carried over
to the next moment, the next day, the next year.
Memory never contains truth, only what is past, dead, gone.

Truth comes into the non-seeking mind fresh and alive.
It is not something you can carry with you, accumulate, or hold onto.

Truth leaps into view when the mind is quiet, not asserting itself.
You cannot contain or domesticate truth, for if you do, it dies instantly.

Truth prowls the unknown waiting for a gap in the mind’s activity.
When that gap is there, the truth leaps out of the unknown into the known.

Instantly you comprehend it and sense its sacredness.
The timeless has broken through like a flash of lightning
and illuminated the moment with its presence.

Truth comes to an innocent mind as a blessing and a sacrament.
Truth is a holy thing because it liberates thought from itself
and illumines the human heart from the inside out.

© Adyashanti 2009 

In one sense, part of our question-and-answer sessions is that you shoot your conceptual arrow. It’s like we meet out in a big meadow, and you’re at one end, and I’m at this end. And the Truth is the meadow. The Truth is the space. The Truth is the presence that is permeating the whole thing. But if you don’t get that, then you shoot a conceptual arrow: “This is what I think. This is my question.” And if you shoot a conceptual arrow, I shoot one back. And if we are lucky, both of those arrows meet tip to tip. And if they meet tip to tip in mid-air, they destroy each other. 

There is yet another invitation and opportunity: to see the space that’s left when those two concepts mutually destroy each other. And if you don’t get it, then you'll lob another conceptual arrow: “Well, what about this?” And so we just shoot, and we hit tip to tip—boom. Really what it’s about is that mutual destruction of concepts, of viewpoints, of world views. And all that’s left is the consciousness that it’s happening in. That’s the Truth; that’s where all the wisdom is. It's not in your conceptual arrow, and it’s not in mine. Mine is just meant to hit yours. 

It’s just like these words—they are not true. They are just meant to hit concepts within you. And maybe they will hit tip to tip and reveal space. Of course, that was there before we ever lobbed the concepts. Before we shot the conceptual arrows, that state of consciousness was there, because that’s what we are shooting the arrows in. The arrows can be many things: They can be our questions. They can be our demand that it should be this way or that way. Whatever it is, we are just shooting it right through consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t care. Innocence doesn’t mind. 

But when those concepts hit each other and destroy each other, that’s the welcoming, the opportunity to wake up as that space that all this is happening in. When we see that, we stop putting importance in our conceptual arrows, because we already are what all our concepts are looking for. You already are the space in which the questions come.  That space is what you are—that’s the end of it.

So any spiritual talk, any spiritual book, any sutra, is just a conceptual arrow. But what does the mind do? The mind grabs the arrow and thinks the Truth is in the arrow, and it starts to look at it, and it starts to collect them and put them in its little arrow package. When it gets a lot of arrows, it starts to feel safe. It has a lot of ammunition to defend itself against everything. And that’s what happens until it doesn’t. That’s how the mind operates. It’s a collecting of conceptual arrows.

But it doesn't matter how many arrows you have. Life is always shooting another one. And life has better aim than you do. It's always fracturing you. Have you ever noticed? So the blessing is seeing that it's not about what conceptual arrows we have, what conceptual demands we have, what emotional demands we are making upon this moment, whether those are met or unmet. It's really not about that. When we see that, then we stop fracturing ourselves. We stop looking for ourselves in the concepts or even in some emotional experience.

We start to see this innocent state of being that exists prior to all of that. And it's in the middle of all of that as well, and after all of that. That state of being is what you are. That's the awakening that's what you are, because then you don't have a relationship with it anymore. You are not objectifying it somewhere else. Just to let go of your demand for this state of silence, to let go of any demand you might have upon it for just half a second, that's all it takes for it to reveal itself, to wake up.

From Adyashanti's Santa Cruz, CA Meeting, March 2001

© Adyashanti 2001

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