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A truly spiritual life is a life dedicated to a series of self-transcending commitments. By self-transcending I do not mean self-denying or self-negating, I mean something that is all-inclusive and not ego driven. I also mean something that is for the benefit of all beings. But essentially self-transcending commitments are doorways into all-inclusive reality, the reality of our true nature that is the fabric of our actual existence. In a sense, spiritual practice is the practice of helping true nature realize itself and embody itself as each of our lives as consciously as possible.

I do not intend this to be understood in a theoretical way, because to say that our practice is the practice of helping true nature realize itself is more of a poetic statement. It is something that you feel and intuit more than something that you believe or hold as a concrete fact. It is a way of understanding and approaching spirituality and spiritual practice from a broad and non-egocentric perspective. True nature is our true nature, and it is also something that we are serving and helping, and it is also serving and helping each of us as well. This is the paradox of spiritual practice that is so important to understand. But this understanding can only grow out of practice like a flower grows out of the ground. We cannot truly understand this paradox abstractly in our conceptual mind, it only grows out of the soil of committed spiritual practice. Which is to say that we must do it in order to understand it. Most things in life are like this, you must do them in order to understand them.

You cannot understand what an apple tastes like unless you eat an apple, or what it feels like to create music unless you are a musician, or what if feels like to give birth to a baby until you actually give birth. There is an old saying that expresses this idea in a different way. It says, “Do not judge someone until you walk a mile in their shoes.” I think that our world would be a much kinder and loving place if we all put this into practice. Such a practice is a good example of a self-transcending commitment. It is a good spiritual practice because it is not egocentric, it is wisdom born of actual human experience. This is something that we need to remember, wisdom is always and only born of non-egocentric human experience. Wisdom is not an abstraction, is not a belief, opinion, or reaction; it is born of experience.

Spiritual practice is so important because it is rooted in experience, meaning that it is something that you do. It is a commitment to doing something rather than merely thinking and conceptualizing. This is why we meditate and bring great awareness to each moment of our lives, and question our beliefs, and inquire, and seek to embody our understanding within the context of our daily lives. It is exacting, humbling, joyous and liberating spiritual practice. It is true nature waking up to itself and embodying itself as this very life. It is who and what we are, and it is also what we serve moment to moment through our commitment to being as awake and loving as we can. My teacher said that we are always being, and always becoming Buddha. This is true wisdom, not too attached to always and already being, and not too attached to always becoming. To experience this is to be like an eternal stable mountain that flows like water nourishing the entire earth. This to me is what the spiritual life is.

Copyright © 2021 Adyashanti.

Leslie writes: Several years ago, while on retreat with you, the insight suddenly hit that what I had thought of as “me” was just an illusory boundary. I laughed and cried as beliefs seemed to pop and dissolve like soap bubbles. Awareness or presence, well, just simply is.

A lot of seeking has fallen away, but the perception of unity or “Everything is one” still remains not really experienced. Any pointers or inquiries you would suggest for unity to move beyond intellectual understanding? I somehow intuit that it’s another layer of “illusory boundary” that hasn’t been seen through. Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to crack an unsolvable riddle!

Adyashanti: Here is the direct answer to your question: Simply contemplate the question “What is the world?” By contemplate, I mean to simply form the question in your mind. Don’t think about it. Just present the question and relax your awareness as much as possible. That’s the “how.”

Experiencing unity is a bit like getting a joke. The “getting” of a joke is what causes the laughter. In a sense, the getting is the laughter. But we don’t laugh because we have analyzed the joke and come to understand it; we laugh because the joke exposes something about ourselves. It removes the seriousness of the boundaries that we believe in and live by. It reveals that they are absurd and therefore funny. The same is true of the beliefs that cause us to experience boundaries. In a very real sense, beliefs are the creators of the experience of boundaries. They are absurd, even if at times useful, fictions, but only experienced as absurd when we see that they are absurd and worthy of a good laugh.

Every description, every name, every belief—good or bad—every concept, creates boundaries where there are in fact no boundaries at all. Even to say “I” instantly imposes a boundary upon what is actually a unified field of being. To say “I” instantly creates what is not “I.” “Big” is always in relationship to “small,” “up” in relationship to “down,” “good” in relationship to “bad,” “heads” of a coin in relationship to “tails.” Words imply that these opposites exist separately from one another, but they do not. They are simply different ways of looking at the same thing. You cannot have the crest of a wave without also having its trough; they are in reality one dynamic process.

As I have often said, each thing is its total environment. Remove the environment in which anything exists, and the thing will also not exist, which is to say that there is no such thing as a thing. To call something a thing, or to give it a name, is to conceptually impose boundaries upon it where they do not actually exist. A tree does not exist independently of its environment; it is its total environment. It takes a cosmos to produce a tree—no cosmos, no tree. To say “tree” implies the entire cosmos. The same is true of you.

When we give any aspect of the cosmos a name like tree, or human being, or rain cloud, we forget that we are imposing boundaries where there actually are no boundaries. There are, of course, practical uses to doing such a thing, but practical usefulness does not mean that what we are naming actually exists independently from the dynamic process of life. Even to say that we are presence or awareness mistakenly implies that we are not what we are aware of. It is an intermediate level of realization, and is much more freeing than experiencing ourselves to be a separate someone, but is still defined and experienced as its own form of formless separateness. It is formless presence as opposed to the world of forms. But formlessness and form appear together, and beyond even together. They are ways of looking at one dynamic process. They are simply two different points of view from within that process.

When we drop whatever point of view we are entertaining, the illusory experience of separateness and having conceptually imposed boundaries disappears. Concepts, names, descriptions, beliefs, and opinions are nothing more than abstract ideas that have the power to create very real feelings and experiences within our bodies and alter our perception of the world to an extraordinary extent. So even though concepts are a part of daily functioning, and necessarily so to some degree (though not to the degree that we imagine), when we forget that the boundaries they impose upon our perception is an illusion, we take the conceptual game of naming and believing far too seriously and lose not only our sense of humor, but also any deep sense of freedom and love. We stop taking ourselves lightly and become like an unbendable blade of grass forever bracing itself against the slightest breeze.

In truth we are the All, as is everyone and everything else. There is simply nothing else to be. The All is not here to be understood as a noun; it is a process, and not even that. It is the process of existence and nonexistence as well. It cannot be known in the conventional sense, because all that is known is an idea, an object within consciousness. And by the way, ideas are it too. But it is not defined or limited by its ideas. The All that you are can only be lived, either unconsciously or consciously. It has a simple intuitive regard for itself, from within all of itself. If you want to find yourself, just open your eyes, and there you are. Or close your eyes, and there you are: something, nothing, someone, no one, everything, not-a-thing. Living, dying, smiling, crying—one Self experienced as many selves. The entire cosmos awake to itself, and not even that, and all of that.

Quick now, where is the Buddha?

With Great Love,
Adya

Excerpted from “The Philosophy of Enlightenment”

© Adyashanti 2016

Excerpted from Adya’s book Sacred Inquiry

Q: I know directly and profoundly that I am nothing. And from that knowing it’s clear, at least intellectually and maybe more deeply, that the multiplicity of appearance is an expression of nothingness. But I still get caught in multiplicity, especially in anger and despair over the havoc we are causing on the planet. It seems to me that until I can hold the facts of resource depletion, species extinction, and climate change in the space of nothingness, the process of awakening is incomplete.

Do I accept that the humanity in me will always be outraged about these things and that there can simultaneously be a knowing of the nothingness of it? Or is there a “place” where there is only abiding in the nothingness of multiplicity? How can I work with this incompleteness and know that I am everything in the way Nisargadatta did?

A: So many people are outraged at the senseless way that we treat each other and this amazing planet that we find ourselves on. Does that outrage solve the immense problems of humanity, or does it fuel them? It seems to me that the world does not need any more outrage than it already has. It does, though, desperately need more love put into action. Perhaps your feelings of outrage are actually originating in a love that you have not yet fully acknowledged and acted upon. Perhaps if you saw how much you truly care and love, and got on with expressing that as best you could, you would not feel outraged and afraid. Love denied turns to anger. Love expressed creates the space and conditions where more love can flower. Love isn’t just a feeling—it is an act of courage.

© Adyashanti 2021

Excerpted from Adya’s audio course Redemptive Love (Q&A)

Q: I have been sitting with allowing all things to be as they are—my illness, confusion, relationships, etc.—and in that silent acceptance I feel peace. But when I have to actually interact with the world, I can feel myself responding from my conditioned mind and ego. Sitting with the idea of redemptive love when I am alone seems to be easier than when life presents situations asking for my engagement—husband, children, clients, family, etc.

What could I practice in such moments, or what thought can I contemplate to help me move more from a place of authenticity rather than craving to be alone?

A: It is easier to be in a state of acceptance when you are alone and not in relationship with anything other than yourself. But life is nothing but constant relationship: relationship with the environment, people, situations, work, play, as well as with your own inner experience. The question is, “How am I to be in relationship with all of life?” Even if we have experienced the oneness of all existence, the One is still in constant relationship with itself. So, from where inside are we relating to all of the events of life?

In any situation we are either relating from fear or love. If we are trying to control, manipulate, gain power over, dominate, be agreed with, be loved, be right, be a victim, etc., we are relating from fear. And since fear is a very weak force, although it can be experienced very strongly, we are diminished and dominated by it. Fear in all its varied forms is what fuels the dream state of sorrow and violence. Wherever it is motivating action, it is ultimately destructive and life numbing. This is not to say that one should not feel fear, only that to act or relate from fear is destructive. Simply because we feel fear does not mean that we need to act and relate from it. In fact, the more open we are to experiencing fear, the less it controls our actions. Love does not fear fear, because Love is a much stronger force in the world.

The remedy for fear is not courage, it is Love—although courage is sometimes necessary. Love will always conquer fear.

So ask yourself, “What would Love do?”—not your idea of love, which for most people is quite distorted, but the universal reality of love. This is not as complicated as people make it out to be. So don’t refer to your ideas about love, but rather evoke the reality of love by simply asking the question, What would Love do? This question is a deep inquiry, something to really sit with and allow to grow within yourself. You must get underneath your old ideas of what Love is and how it moves in the world. Sit in the silence of the question. Don’t jump to quick answers. And remember that Love is not sentimental or indulgent. Love is fearless, wise, and true, and therefore it is an extremely healing and unifying grace. Love is absolute intimacy and truth in action.

Love is absolute intimacy and truth in action. Remember this and contemplate it until it begins to come alive within you. Love is absolute intimacy and truth in action. Love is the living embodiment of grace.

Although Redemptive Love can be experienced as a healing infusion of grace, it also seeks to be put into action.

© Adyashanti 2014

Rediscovered years later in an old file, the following talk was written by Adyashanti in preparation for the first silent retreat he taught, in July 1997:

Starting right now, this moment, I am asking you to become the Buddha. I am asking you to take your stand, to stand absolutely firm in your intention to awaken to the Truth of your Self.

This is what the Buddha did. He didn’t say, “I’ll try.” He didn’t say, “I hope I’ll find the Truth.” He didn’t say, “I’ll do my best.” He didn’t say, “If not in this lifetime, then maybe next lifetime.” He came to the point where he didn’t look for anyone else to tell him the Truth or show him the Truth. He came to the point where he took it all on himself. He sat alone under the Bodhi Tree and vowed never to give up until the Truth be realized.

The power of this very simple, yet unshakable intention and absolute stand to be liberated in this lifetime propelled him to awaken to the simple fact that he and all beings are liberated—that all beings are freedom itself. Pure awakeness.

The Buddha was no different from you. No different. That is why he serves as a good model, because he was as you are now. So don’t worship the Buddha. Don’t put him on a pedestal. Don’t even look up to him. Become him. Have the same intentions, take the same stand. Be the Buddha now! Put an end to all delaying, to all excuses, to all bowing down to saintly figures of the past or present. Stand up!
You are the Buddha! You are freedom itself! Stop dreaming your dream! Stop pretending that you are in bondage—stop telling yourself that lie! Stop pretending to be someone, or something! You are no one, you are no-thing! You are not this body or this mind. This body and mind exist within who and what you are. You are pure consciousness, already free, awake, and liberated. Stand up and walk out of your dream. I am here to say that you can do this.

Step out of the dream of your concepts and ideas. Step out of the dream of what you imagine enlightenment to be. Step out of the dream of who you think you are. Step out of the dream of everything you have ever known. Step out of your dream of being a deluded person. Stop telling yourself those lies and dreaming those dreams. Step out of all of that. You can do it. Nothing is holding you back. There are no requirements and no prerequisites to awaken. There is nothing to be done, nothing to think, nowhere to go.

Just stop all dreaming. Stop all doing. Stop all excuses. Just stop and be still. Effortlessly be still. Grace will do the rest.

At each and every moment from here on out, have the intention to directly experience Truth, your true liberated Self. Don’t think about the Truth—directly return to your experience here, now, moment to moment. Experience Truth. Experience your Self. Dive into your experience. Your experience! Your experience of hearing, of seeing, of tasting, of breathing, of your heart beating, of your feet touching the floor, of the birds, of the wind.

Experience the vastness of who you are. Experience the freedom of who you are. You are the Buddha—experience that. You are the Buddha.

© 2005 Adyashanti