“That unchanging aliveness, that spark within you, is the light of the world. That’s the light that allows everything to come into being.”
~ by Adyashanti
To awaken to the absolute view is profound and transformative, but to awaken from all fixed points of view is the birth of true nonduality….
Enlightenment means the end of all division. It is not simply having an occasional experience of unity beyond all division, it is actually being undivided.
This is what nonduality truly means. It means there is just One Self, without a difference or gap between the profound revelation of Oneness and the way it is perceived and lived every moment of life.
Nonduality means that the inner revelation and the outer expression of the personality are one and the same. So few seem to be interested in the greater implication contained within profound spiritual experiences, because it is the contemplation of these implications which quickly brings to awareness the inner divisions existing within most seekers.
~ by Adyashanti
When awakening happens, the heart has to open. For realization to be complete it has to really hit on three levels — head, heart, and gut — because you can have a very clear, enlightened mind, which you’ll know in a deep way, but your being won’t be dancing.
Then, when the heart starts to open just like the mind, your being starts to dance. Then everything comes alive. And when your gut opens up, there is that deep, deep, unfathomable stability where that opening, who is you, just died into transparency. It’s become the absolute. You are That.
There is an expression, “solid emptiness.” In the mind, the emptiness isn’t so solid. It’s very space-like, ethereal, and that’s enlightenment on the level of mind. Enlightenment on the level of heart is an aliveness, a sense that all of me is dancing. The enlightenment on the level of gut is an emptiness that is similar to that of the mind, but it’s like a mountain, a transparent mountain. All of these are expressions in the human being of the Truth.
Many times when people are awakening to this love, they will tell me, “Adya, it’s just too much for me — its going to tear me apart.” Ridiculous! Too much for you? You’re transparent. You are empty. It just goes through you and beyond. Through you and beyond! It’s only when you hold yourself in a particular way that it feels like too much. You are holding an idea of your personal boundary, your edge, and of course you can’t contain it. Love was never meant to be contained.
~ From: Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti
True love has nothing to do with liking someone, agreeing with him or her, or being compatible. It is a love of unity, a love of seeing God wearing all the masks and recognizing itself in them all. Without it, Truth becomes an abstraction that is sort of cool and analytical, and that is not the real Truth.
The Truth exposes itself in the willingness to open to this intimate connectedness with everything. Whether the personality likes it or not, an intimate connection is there.
Sometimes it will rush to the fore and make itself known in a very obvious way. Sometimes it will burn in the background like embers, just there for everything.
With this love, you can feel the walls of opposition come down naturally in the acknowledgement of a deep connection. Not only do the walls of opposition fall, but love is felt for every human being and for life itself.
True love is like the love of a parent for a child: even though you feel frustrated at times, this love is constant. It is similar to life, which might drive you bananas at times … or be really nice.
This love is beyond the good moments and the difficult moments, which continue to happen. When you have awakened to this love that transcends every good and bad moment, a radical revolution occurs in your relationship with life itself.
This is a love that has no opposite, such as hate, but is present through everything, in all moments.
When you realize this, it is a revolution because, when you see that this love that you are loves the unlovable, loves what you’re not supposed to love or what you were not allowed to love culturally, and is not paying attention to the separating rules of ego, you realize this is a different kind of love.
Please understand that this (essential) love of which I speak is not exclusive in that it does not exclude other experiences of love. Friendship love, marriage love, and many other kinds of love have their own way of being and moving through the world. But I’m talking about the essence itself, the essence that is within all the flavors of love.
This is the real spiritual love, which is a deep unspoken connectedness. Only this love has the power to transform our relationship to being alive, our relationship with each other, and our relationship with the world. This love is timeless. This love is uncontained.
~ From: Emptiness Dancing, by Adyashanti.
There’s a fabulous new feature on Adyashanti’s Web site. In Cafe Dharma, he is offering a free streaming video of his basic teachings. In this specially-recorded 30-minute video, Adya outlines the essential principles that form a foundation of understanding of his teaching. By clarifying the fundamental ideas of suffering, ego, freedom, and awakened values, he invites you to look beyond patterns of thinking that cause suffering. The video is incredibly potent, clear, and direct. You can find it >>>HERE.
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.
To read the rest of the interview: >>>Click Here
From the book and CD, The End of Your World, by Adyashanti
While the world is trying to solve its problems and everyone around you is engaged in the same, you’re not. While everybody around you is trying to figure it out, trying to arrive, trying to “get there,” trying to be worthy, you’re not. While everyone thinks that awakening is a grand, noble, halo-enshrouded thing, for you it’s not. While everybody is running from this life right now, in this moment, to try to get there, you’re not.
Where everybody has an argument with somebody else, mostly everybody else, starting with themselves, you don’t. Where everybody is so sure that happiness will come when something is different than it is now, you know that it won’t. When everybody else is looking to achieve the perfect state
and hold on to it, you’re not.
When everybody around you has a whole host of ideas and beliefs about a whole variety of things, you don’t. Everyone on the path is getting there; you haven’t gotten anywhere. Everyone is climbing the mountain; you’re selling hiking boots and picks at the foot in the hope that if they climb it and come back down, they may be too exhausted to do it again.
When everybody else is looking to the next book, to the next teacher, to the next guru to be told what’s real, to be given the secret key to an awakened life, you’re not. You don’t have a key because there’s not a lock to put it in.
When you’re living what you are in an awakened way, being simply what you’ve always been, you’re actually very simple. You basically sit around wondering what all the fuss is about.
When everyone is sitting around saying, “I hope that happens to me,” you remember when you did that. You remember that you didn’t find a solution to that. You remember that the whole idea that there was a problem created all of that.
When you’re being what you are, when you’re living the awakened life, there’s nobody to forgive, because there’s no resentment held, no matter what.
The truth of your being doesn’t crave happiness; it could actually care less. It doesn’t crave love, not because you are so full of love, but because it just doesn’t crave love. It’s very simple. It doesn’t seek to be known, regarded highly, or understood. When you’re living what you are in an awakened way, there’s no ideal for you anymore. You’ve stepped off the entire cycle of suffering, of becoming; you’re not interested.
It’s a curious life you find yourself in. You find yourself… where you are. Not where I am, where you are. Where you really are. Where we really are. It’s a curious place to be (especially in the beginning) not to be driven by anything — pleasure or displeasure, helping or hurting, loving or hating. The only thing that will move you (and I don’t mean to be too poetic about this) is the same thing that moves a leaf hanging from a tree. It’s simply because the breeze blows that way.
So you always know what to do: The breeze blows that way, and that’s the way you go. You don’t ask questions anymore. You don’t evaluate why the breeze is blowing that way because you know that you don’t know why. And you know you can’t know why. There’s never been a leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way on that day at that moment. That breeze changes the orientation of your life, moment to moment to moment, simply because that’s the way life’s moving. And when you’re living in your awakened self you have no argument with the way it’s moving because it is the same as you are.
And you know that the breeze was always there, from the very beginning, and that it wasn’t reserved for special people. If you didn’t notice it at some point in your life, you know it was because you weren’t listening, or because you thought you had to figure something out before you could listen, or because you thought there had to be some conclusion before you could just listen so deeply, so without agenda, so without hope of a better future that you would feel the movement.
To read the rest of this article: >Click Here.
~ From the Awakened Living Intensive. Berkeley, CA. 2003 by Adyashanti
What is that thing? What is that concern? What is that imperitive? … because, without knowing that, and feeling that, and being clear on that, and really honing in on that … the rest of your spiritual life would be moving away from it.
Then realize, you are the Ultimate Source of it — the source of your own seeking, your own longing, your own intention, of what you want, of what you’re interested in, of all of that. And when you come back to the Source, you come back to exactly where you should be.
And then you will be interested in exactly what you need to be and should be interested in at this moment, because it’s authentic to you. And anything else will not be authentic to you, and therefore, will yield very little result.
Isn’t it great when you realize it’s all you?”
by Adyashanti, in the CD Album “Enlightenment: The Direct Approach”
True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not fixated on objects of perception. When you first start to meditate you notice that awareness is always focused 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 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 are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to manipulate 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 (consciousness) 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.
Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside. Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects.
Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes. As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive contractions and identifications, and returns to its natural non-state of Presence.
The simple yet profound question, “Who Am I ?,” can then reveal one’s self not to be the endless tyranny of the ego-personality, but objectless Freedom of Being — Primordial Consciousness in which all states and all objects come and go as manifestations of the Eternal Unborn Self that YOU ARE.
by Adyashanti
What is this revolution? To begin with, revolution is not static; it is alive, ongoing. Realization of the ultimate reality is a fact. Revolution is the continuous ongoing birth of intelligence. This intelligence restructures your entire being. This intelligence cuts the mind free of itself, of its old structures which are rooted become free of the old structures of human consciousness, then one is still in a prison, the prison of humanity’s consciousness.
This revolution is the awakening of an intelligence which alone has the ability to uproot all of the old structures of one’s consciousness. Unless these structures are uprooted, there will be no creative thought or action or response. Unless there is an inner revolution, nothing new and fresh can flower. Only the old will flower in the absence of this revolution. But our potential lies beyond the known, beyond the structures of the past, beyond anything that humanity has established.
One must be willing to stand alone — in the unknown, with no reference to authority or the past or any of one’s conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility.
by Daniela Sarahyba