The Seer

Awakening — an interview with Adyashanti by Renate McNay of Conscious.TV in the UK.

Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher and the author of several books including, ‘Impact of Awakening’, ‘Emptiness Dancing’, ‘Falling Into Grace’ and ‘The End Of Your World’.

In this interview he talks in detail about his years as a Zen meditator; life as a top athlete; his two significant awakenings; the obstacles he discovered in the way, and the nature of illusion.

If you can’t see the video above, >>>Click Here

Also, don’t miss Adya’s Free live broadcast — available in both audio and video formats — on Thurs. Dec. 8th, 8am Perth Time, pre-program music, 9-10:30am Perth Time. See the time in your local area.

Available to anyone with an internet connection. Just go to: and click on “Audio Stream” or “Video Stream” according to your prefernce.

‘Stillness’ — An Interview with Mukti by Renate McNay of Conscious.TV in the UK.

Mukti, a Californian spiritual teacher of Irish descent is married to Adyashanti. Their teaching in Australia in 2007 is still much appreciated.

Mukti had an early yearning to know God. She felt a fire in herself to find a direct experience of the Divine. This led to her discovering her true nature — an awareness that recognised itself as ‘emptiness’.

If the video does not appear above: Click Here

You can read more about Mukti and what she has to say on ’spiritual marriage’, >>>HERE

The real search isn’t a search into tomorrow, or to anywhere other than now. It’s starting to look into the very nature of this moment. In order to do that, you have to “stand in your own two shoes,” as my teacher used to say. What she meant by “standing in your own two shoes” is you have to look clearly into your own experience.

Stop trying to have someone else’s experience. Stop chasing freedom or happiness, or even spiritual enlightenment. Stand in your own shoes, and examine closely: What’s happening right here and right now? Is it possible to let go of trying to make anything happen? Even in this moment, there may be some suffering, there may be some unhappiness, but even if there is, is it possible to no longer push against it, to try to get rid of it, to try to get somewhere else?

I understand that our instinct is to move away from what’s not comfortable, to try to get somewhere better, but as my teacher used to say, “You need to take the backward step, not the forward step.” The forward step is always moving ahead, always trying to attain what you want, whether it’s a material possession or inner peace. The forward step is very familiar: seeking and more seeking, striving and more striving, always looking for peace, always looking for happiness, looking for love.

To take the backward step means to just turn around, reverse the whole process of looking for satisfaction on the outside, and look at precisely the place where you are standing. See if what you are looking for isn’t already present in your experience.

So, again, to lay the groundwork for awakening, we must first let go of struggling. You let go by acknowledging that the end of struggle is actually present in your experience now. The end of struggle is peace. Even if your ego is struggling, even if you’re trying to figure this out and “do it right,” if you really look, you might just see that struggle is happening within a greater context of peace, within an inner stillness. But if you try to make stillness happen, you’ll miss it. If you try to make peace happen, you’ll miss it. This is more like a process of recognition, giving recognition to a stillness that is naturally present.

We’re not bringing struggle to an end. We’re not trying to not struggle anymore. We’re just noticing that there is a whole other dimension to consciousness that, in this very moment, isn’t struggling, isn’t resentful, isn’t trying to get somewhere. You can literally feel it in your body. You can’t think your way to not struggling. There isn’t a three-point plan of how not to struggle. It’s really a one-point plan: Notice that the peace, this end of struggling, is actually already present.

The process is therefore one of recognition. We recognize that there is peace now, even if your mind is confused. You may see that even when you touch upon peace now, the mind is so conditioned to move away from it that it will try to argue with the basic fact of peace’s existence within you: “I can’t be at peace yet because I have to do this, or that, or this question hasn’t been answered, or that question hasn’t been answered, or so-and-so hasn’t apologized to me.”

There are all sorts of ways that the egoic mind can insist that something needs to happen, something needs to change, in order for you to be at peace. But this is part of the dream of the mind. We’re all taught that something needs to change for us to experience true peace and freedom.

Just imagine for a moment that this isn’t true. Even though you may believe that it’s true, just imagine for a moment: What would it be like if you didn’t need to struggle, if you didn’t need to make an effort to find peace and happiness? What would that feel like now? And just take a moment to be quiet and see if peace or stillness is with you in this moment.

~ From: Falling Into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering, by Adyashanti

A true teacher is one who opens space within your mind.

If you turn your attention away from everything else and merge with that space, you awaken as that consciousness.

This space is the true teacher’s gift.

It is an open door, but you must walk through it. Surrender to the space within yourself that the teacher awakens.

Emptiness is the true teacher’s transmission. Surrender to that alone, and you will discover limitless fullness of being.

~ From: The Impact of Awakening, by Adyashanti

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

As soon as the mind pulls out an agenda and decides what needs to change, that’s unreality. Life doesn’t need to decide who’s right and who’s wrong. Life doesn’t need to know the “right” way to go because it’s going there anyway.

Then you start to get a hint of why the mind, in a deep sense of liberation, tends to get very quiet. It doesn’t have its job anymore. It has its usefulness, but it doesn’t have its full-time occupation of sustaining an intricately fabricated house of cards.

This stillness of awareness is all there is. It’s all one. This awareness and life are one thing, one movement, one happening, in this moment — unfolding without reason, without goal, without direction. The ultimate state is ever present and always now.

The only thing that makes it difficult to find that state and remain in that state is people wanting to retain their position in space and time. “I want to know where I’m going. I want to know if I’ve arrived. I want to know who to love and hate. I want to know. I don’t really want to be; I want to know. Isn’t enlightenment the ultimate state of knowing?” No. It’s the ultimate state of being. The price is knowing.

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

In your humanity, there’s the natural expression of joy and love and compassion and caring and total unattachment. Those qualities instantly transmute into humanness when you touch into emptiness. Emptiness becomes love. That’s the human experience of emptiness, that source, that ever-present awakeness.

For the humanness to lay itself down — your mind, your body, your hopes, your dreams, everything — to lay itself down in the same unconditional manner in which awareness is ever present, only then is there the direct experience of unity, that you and the highest truth are really one thing.

It expresses itself through your humanity, through openness, through love. The divine becomes human and the human becomes divine — not in any “high and mighty” sense, but just in the sense of reality. That’s the way it is.

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

~ Adyashanti. www.adyashanti.org

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

Sincerity is a word that I often use in teaching to convey the importance of being rooted in the qualities of honesty, authenticity, and genuineness. There can be nothing phony or contrived in our motivations if we are to fully awaken to our natural and integral state of unified awareness. While teachings and teachers can point us inward to “the peace beyond all understanding,” it is always along the thread of our inner sincerity, or lack thereof, that we will travel.

For the ego is clever and artful in the ways of deception, and only the honesty and genuineness of our ineffable being are beyond its influence. At each step and with each breath we are given the option of acting and responding, both inwardly and outwardly, from the conditioning of egoic consciousness which values control and separation above all else, or from the intuitive awareness of unity which resides in the inner silence of our being.

Without sincerity it is so very easy for even the greatest spiritual teachings to become little more than playthings of the mind. In our fast-moving world of quick fixes, big promises, and short attention spans, it is easy to remain on a very surface level of consciousness without even knowing it. While the awakened state is ever present and closer than your feet, hands, or eyes, it cannot be approached in a casual or insincere fashion.

There’s a reason that seekers the world over are instructed to remove their shoes and quiet their voices before entering into sacred spaces. The message being conveyed is that one’s ego must be “taken off and quieted” before access to the divine is granted. All of our ego’s attempts to control, demand, and plead with reality have no influence on it other than to make life more conflicted and difficult. But an open mind and sincere heart have the power to grant us access to realizing what has always been present all along.

When people asked the great Indian sage Nisargadatta what he thought was the most important quality to have in order to awaken, he would say “earnestness.” When you are earnest, you are both sincere and one-pointed; to be one-pointed means to keep your attention on one thing. I have found that the most challenging thing for most spiritual seekers to do is to stay focused on one thing for very long.

The mind jumps around with its concerns and questions from moment to moment. Rarely does it stay with one question long enough to penetrate it deeply. In spirituality it is very important not to let the egoic mind keep jumping from one concern to the next like an untrained dog. Remember, awakening is about realizing your true nature and dissolving all attachment to egoic consciousness.

My grandmother who passed away a few years ago used to say to me jokingly, “Getting old is not for wimps.” She was well aware of the challenges of an aging body, and while she never complained or felt any pity for herself, she knew firsthand that aging had its challenges as well as its benefits. There was a courage within my grandmother that served her well as she approached the end of her life, and I am happy to say that when she passed, it was willingly and without fear.

In a similar way the process of coming into a full and mature awakening requires courage, as not only our view of life but life itself transforms to align itself with the inner mystic vision. A sincere heart is a robust and courageous heart willing to let go in the face of the great unknown expanse of Being—an expanse which the egoic mind has no way of knowing or understanding.

When one’s awareness opens beyond the dream state of egoic consciousness to the infinite no-thing-ness of intuitive awareness, it is common for the ego to feel much fear and terror as this transition begins. While there is nothing to fear about our natural state of infinite Being, such a state is beyond the ego’s ability to understand, and as always, egos fear whatever they do not understand and cannot control.

As soon as our identity leaves the ego realm and assumes its rightful place as the infinite no-thing-ness/every-thing-ness of awareness, all fear vanishes in the same manner as when we awaken from a bad dream. In the same manner in which my grandmother said, “Getting old is not for wimps,” it can also be said that making the transition from the dream state to the mature, awakened state requires courage.

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

~ Adyashanti 2008 www.adyashanti.org/

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’s 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 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. www.adyashanti.org

The metaphor of being spiritually “awake” is used a lot but not always with deep reflection. The actual experience of sudden opening is very much like waking up .

It’s as if you’ve been drifting through life in a dream state and just not known it. The dream-like barrier of mental filters and projections that has stifled your perception for so long falls away like a heavy blanket.

Nothing around you has changed, but you finally, truly see things as they are. You blink, look around yourself, and are surprised to realize you’ve been in a sort of half-seeing trance all your life… and now you’re awake.

Today I Awoke

Today I awoke, finally I see the Self has re-turned to the Self.
The Self is none other than the Self.
I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.
The birds outside sing…
The birds outside sing and there am I.
The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.
The body breathes, breathing am I.
I am awake and I know that I am awake.
Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.
But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.
I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.
I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.
I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha’s.
Today the leaf has returned to the root.
I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.
I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.
I am free. I am free because I am awake.
So ordinary. Who would have thought ? Who could have guessed?
I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand life times.
Ten thousand life times but today I am home.
Ten thousand life times but today I am home.
This is not an experience. This is me.
I am awake. Finally, I am awake.
Nothing has changed, but I am awake.
Before I tasted the root many times and felt, how delicious.
Today I became the root. How ordinary.

~ by Adyashanti. From: My Secret is Silence: Poems & Sayings ….

~ For more poems about ‘Awakening’: >>>Click Here

It has been ten years since I began teaching, and in those years there has been much change and evolution in the expression of the teaching, as well as the emergence of a growing community and supportive organization. Since I began teaching at my teacher’s request, I have focused on only one thing: to express and transmit the fundamental realization of unity that lies at the heart of all forms of true spirituality in the most direct and unadorned way possible.

I have always held the conviction that while the various spiritual traditions and lineages are valuable carriers of ancient teachings, practices, and subtle transmissions, they need to have a constant living renewal breathed into them by truly free and creative human beings lest they start serving the needs of the dream state and not those of the awakened state.

It is good to remember that the goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians. In the same vein, my teachings are not meant to acquire followers or imitators, but to awaken beings to eternal truth and thus to awakened life and living.

To serve this intention my teaching has been, and continues to be, in a constant state of renewal. As more and more of my students come into the deeper realms of spiritual adulthood, so too does the expression of the teachings evolve to address and clarify the deeper reaches of spirituality.

I find that as time goes on I can touch upon more subtle and challenging aspects of spiritual awakening as those who come to see me become more established in the deeper aspects of spiritual realization. It is this spontaneous dance and interplay between teacher and student that breathes new life into our shared exploration and expression of truth.

While the expression and scope of this teaching work evolves, it continues to be rooted in the direct experience of awakening from identifying with the body-mind-personality to the universal truth of what we are. For all things and all beings are enlightened Buddhas from the very start and it is only attachment to identity, ideas, and concepts that obscures this fact. Thus the paradox of already being the very truth that you are seeking.

Beware though, for intellectual understanding will do as little to bring you to realization as repeating the word ‘water’ will do to quench your thirst. An intuitive leap of remembrance is what’s called for, for you are awake and nothing, expressing yourself as everything in this very moment.

Never did I anticipate or imagine the size or growth of this Sangha (body of those attending to Truth). There were some evenings in the early days of my teaching when I was the only one who came. On such evenings I would sit in silence for an hour or so before gathering my things and returning home.

Other times two or three people would come, and over time more and more. From the beginning, numbers were unimportant. I always felt that if I could help just one person to truly wake up, I would feel fortunate. And how very fortunate I have been!

I can honestly say that I know much less now than I did ten years ago when I began teaching. Each day that passes now is a deeper step into the unknown, a place far beyond where thought has ever touched. A place where there are no ideas, ideals, nor new theories, but instead a living and dynamic whole which alone can be called sacred, everlasting, and right before our very eyes.

~ Adyashanti. Adya reflects, in 2006, on ten years of teaching (He visited Australia in Oct. 2007)

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

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

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

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

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

Everything actually just is. From the perspective of consciousness, even resistance just is. And if you resist resistance, that’s just what is. You can’t get away from it. You start to see that the only thing that goes into resistance, a story, or an interpretation of what is — whatever it is — is this mind-created persona.

It’s like a character in a novel. When you read a novel, every character has a point of view. It has beliefs. It has opinions. There’s something that makes it distinct from other characters. Our persona is literally this mind-created character that’s always making itself distinct.

So it always needs to evaluate everything against its preconceived idea.

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

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

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

You don’t lose the character; you just gain the whole novel of life. It’s not like you lose anything. You just gain the whole book. You gain the whole universe. As Buddha would say, “Lose yourself, gain the universe.” It’s not a bad deal.

Or Dogen: “To know yourself is to forget yourself, and to forget yourself is to be enlightened by the 10,000 things,” which means to see yourself everywhere. Wake up from your character, and then you see your self nature in all characters — not just one, but all of them.

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

~ Adyashanti, 2005. www.adyashanti.org

~ BTW Adya is among the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People — a list recently published by Watkins Review. (see below)