A Change of Perspective
Tami Simon: Let’s return to your metaphor of awakening being compared to a rocket ship achieving lift-off. How do people know if their rocket ship of being has actually taken off? I could imagine some people being deluded about this. Maybe they have read lots of books about spiritual awakening, so they make the leap in their mind that awakening has occurred, but perhaps in reality they are simply sputtering on the ground. How do we know for sure that we have attained liftoff?
Adyashanti: It’s not an easy question to answer. The only way I can answer it is to reiterate what the nature of awakening is.
The moment of awakening is very similar to when you wake up from a dream at night. You feel that you have awakened from one world to another, from one context to a totally different context. On a feeling level, that is the feeling of awakening. This whole separate self that you thought was real, and even the world that you thought was objective, or other, all of a sudden seems as if it’s not as real as you thought.
I’m not saying it is or isn’t a dream; I’m saying that it’s almost like a dream. Upon awakening, the experience is that life is like a dream that’s happening within what you are — within vast, infinite space. Awakening is not experiencing vast, infinite space, feeling spacious or expanded or blissful or whatever. These feelings may be by-products of awakening, but they are not the awakening itself.
Awakening, quite apart from its by-products, is a change of perspective. Everything we thought was real is seen to not be real at all; it’s more like a dream that’s happening within the infinite expanse of emptiness. What is actually real is the infinite expanse of emptiness. It’s the same way that, when you dream at night, your dream does not have reality; it’s your mind, dreaming your dream, which actually has the reality — relatively speaking.
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From the book and CD, The End of Your World, by Adyashanti