Showing posts with label Adyashanti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adyashanti. Show all posts
Adyashanti - Existential Unity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDJSCBuFhzY



John Tan You as "flow of phenomenality" vs "phenomena is empty", any difference?



Soh Wei Yu as flow of phenomenality is absence of division and agent, anatta, absence of identity

Phenomena
is empty is that the flow of phenomenality is unfindable like chariot,
without any essence undergoing arising/abiding/ceasing, just like
reflections and dreams. Therefore the view of phenomena fluxing and
flowing with momentary arising/abiding/ceasing is also dissolved
1
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THE WORLD OF INTERRELATEDNESS
Thusness commented, "Yes good stuff. "Things" are just set of relations.

Whatever felt, seen, heard, tasted, smelled and thought that seem so real and awareness that is often taken to be more "real than real" is no different from the "chariot" and its basis of designation."

“[3/8/19, 1:23:25 PM] John Tan: However the article (by Adyashanti) should not lump all into one. They are different insights. "More real than real" is one insight. Everything is in fact truly real is another. The "real" is just "inter-ratedness". Then the clear view of the relationships and how to re-understand and live with the new experience and insights.
[3/8/19, 4:53:14 PM] Soh Wei Yu: More real than real is different from everything is in fact truly real? What do you mean? More real than real is just luminosity right
[3/8/19, 4:54:26 PM] Soh Wei Yu: Btw it occurred to me that advaita talks about non arising but the diff with buddhism is that buddhism non arising is the rejection of inherent production due to being free from causation by self, others, both and causeless, which is to say everything is non arising and free from inherent production due to dependent origination. Whereas in advaita everything is non arising due to everything being mere imputation and projection upon the inherently existing substratum of brahman
[3/8/19, 5:06:41 PM] John Tan: Yes. That (More real than real) is also an insight that turns the mind internal. Non-arising means appearances without essence similar to a reflection, like a rainbow. That (More real than real) comes with I AMness. The different between anatta and substantiality is beside appearance, there is innate feeling of some essence separate from the appearances of colors, sensations, sound, smell, taste and thoughts. Therefore one cannot be fully open and release.”


Update:

I wrote to someone to clarify -

"the OP is not about who has the higher view, it is about the necessity
to distinguish the different insights and not lump them all up.

Which is to say, Adyashanti has expressed most of those important insights, but could have done a better job delineating them"

"it is not a dispute, it is just stating that it is necessary to delineate them for readers to understand

I am sure adyashanti will agree if he is around. He did some delineation in his books"

"the “innate feeling of some essence separate from the appearances of...” is not a
criticism of adyashanti’s current mode of insight but the flaw of being
stuck with I AM paradigm.

Which adyashanti has criticised several times himself in recent articles. Adyashanti has warned many times about being stuck in the I AM.

I am very sure, just from adyashanti’s recent expressions alone, that he no longer has “innate feeling of some essence separate from the  appearances of...”

 

THE WORLD OF INTERRELATEDNESS
by Adyashanti

“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.” 
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 
Available as an audio download, The World of Interrelatedness. 
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A Seamless Existence
Adyashanti:

https://www.adyashanti.org/teachings/library/writing#a-seamless-existence

In spiritual realization, if we mistake the first blush, the by-products of first discovery, for that which we’ve discovered, then we remain a kind of immature lover. An immature lover endlessly mistakes love for the experience of falling in love. In the same way, we may remain an immature realizer. We may have realized something, but we can remain in an immature state: “I want it to be this way all the time. I want it to feel like, ‘Oh, my God!’ all the time.” You’re not going to get past the threshold of the doorway of reality doing that. Experience teaches us that, and then we start to let go of it. We move beyond the ego mind into just being what we are. 

That matures for a while. And then at some point, there may be a vast expanse of consciousness. It's like being a conscious, awake, alive, vibrant “nothing.” And it's a great nothing to be—a totally ascendant, transcendent experience. But it starts to dawn on you, “Okay, I am the nothing as opposed to everything else. Something doesn’t quite add up. There’s still some division. Maybe this isn’t the entire picture.” Not that you have to throw away what you’ve realized, but maybe there’s more to the picture. “Maybe it’s not just this stark duality that I have going, being the aware, awake nothing of consciousness and the everything of existence, the form of existence. That’s a fundamental duality.” 

When that interest arises in you, it starts to help. There’s a clutching that you don’t even know is happening. It’s deep in the unconscious. It’s holding on to the new identity of formlessness. There’s a great tendency to want to stay there because it’s a kind of heaven. And you can understand why, because life’s a rough ride sometimes, and then you come into contact with something that’s never been harmed and can’t be harmed ever, and is always there, something that nobody can give you or take away from you. It is such an amazing relief and security to experience something like that. One is not quick to let it go, nor should we be quick to let it go. But it does arise that there may be more to this story. 

That curiosity starts to loosen the unconscious holding on to the new identity as formless awareness. It’s not that the formless awareness identity has to go anywhere; it’s just that the clutching at it starts to loosen. And as it loosens, then the witness position relinquishes itself, and the witnessing collapses into the witnessed. When the holding starts to be relinquished, it’s the descending movement. It descends down into the heart. When this descent happens, the heart starts to awaken, and the witness collapses into the witnessed. Then we start perceiving through the heart, seeing through the heart. Then the witness and what is witnessed seem to be one. They’re the same. 

It's a grand inclusion and the waking up of a perceptual capacity from the heart that sees the underlying unity of existence. Experientially, it’s like looking up at a tree and feeling as if the tree is seeing itself. Or you look up at the sky and it feels as though the sky is seeing itself. Or you touch something and you feel as though what you’re touching is feeling itself.

There’s no subject-object relationship going on anymore. There’s just one seamless thing, whatever you want to call it. Ramana called it the Self. The Buddhists call it Buddha nature. You could even call it the perception of life experiencing itself. “Oh, I thought I was apart from life. I thought life was something that I was in and trying to negotiate.” That’s the egoic perspective. “And now I see that I’m actually life itself, the whole of it, also appearing as a particular part at the same time.” You get to play both sides. 

Excerpted from Mount Madonna Retreat, February 2018
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The Sense of the Heart


by Adyashanti

“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.”

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 Adyashanti’s May 22, 2018 Tahoe Retreat Talk

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Falling Away of Self


In this video, Adyashanti and Susanne Marie discusses the transition from Unity Consciousness and Divine Self (I AM and One Mind phase) phase to No-Self. On another note. I just wrote to our dear Jax after he remarked how rare spiritual realization is: "...when i first realised anatta i was so disappointed that only so few in the world realised anatta, i wrote about it
in my ebook
and i lost confidence in the various traditions in the world and was a bit disheartened. bcos i have already been through those insights and seen beyond that
but if u look deeper, its there in the texts of the various traditions whether dzogchen, mahamudra or zen or theravada. just that few modern teachers are realised.
i recently said to someone that among those with spiritual realizations, maybe 80% are I AM, 10% are one mind, only 2% or less are about anatta and emptiness
which is why i always share the contents of spiritual teachers i find are clear about anatta and emptiness because they are rare jems that need to be brought to light in the spiritual marketplace"

The purpose is not to brag about this or that realization but to point out the rarity of this and therefore treasure it. It is the path to liberation.
p.s. not that any sort of realization is a finality! It's really just another beginning of endless practice-actualization...
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No Longer Finding Self in Identity
https://www.adyashanti.org/
From Adyashanti's Omega Institute Retreat, September 25, 2017.
I've been asked many times, “Adya, I'm experiencing this strange sort of fear, like I'm at the door of some void, and it's just going to swallow me. And somehow I'm strangely, deeply compelled towards it, and absolutely terrified of it, because it feels like it's going to be the end of me.” It's very common in doing this kind of deep work that you can run into this.
Ultimately, in the end, we see through self, but at that point, self isn't a thought and it's not really a feeling, except for fear. It's something you can't identify, like some sort of presence of being that feels extraordinarily threatened. When this really opens up, you quite literally experience the disappearance of everything you know. It seems like the body, the mind, the entire world -- all of existence blinks out of existence.
In a certain sense, the most real sense that there can be, you actually do go through a death. It's not the same thing as a near-death experience -- as transformative as those can be -- it's a death experience. It's the thing we're afraid of, because you think of your body dying, which is what most people are afraid of. But you're only afraid of your body dying because you think that you are associated with the body. What is it that's associated with the body? It's you.
If you were 100% completely convinced that you survive your body dying, death wouldn't feel like a threat to you at all. But since the identification runs so deep there, any threat to your body feels like a threat to your life—as a threat to your ideas can feel like a threat to your life. If you let go here, it feels like, "I will cease to be." This is to experience the death of the entire ego identity. If it really happens all the way through, something doesn't come back from it. There is an irrevocable change or transformation. The good news is that you aren't what you feel is going to die. The only way to know that entirely is for it to die.
My hunch is that when the Buddha associated nirvana with extinction and cessation, this is what he was talking about: to yank identity up from the root. Because until then, it is the journey of identity: "I'm me" -- whatever your sense of yourself is -- "Oh, I'm not, I'm the aware space." And then you have emotional identities: "I'm this open, wide, loving, benevolent presence. That's what I am -- beautiful." Or "I am That -- everywhere I look, there I am." Or if you're a little bit differently oriented, "Everywhere I look, there's the face of God. Okay, now that is what I am. I'm a son or daughter of God."
The fear of it is that it is the death of identity, which is almost impossible to contemplate. The journey is that the identity gets more and more transparent and boundless, until finally identity itself falls away. Then the question "What is it that I am?" is no longer there—not because you have an answer, but because identity is no longer relevant.
In conventional language, you may give it a name like "the infinite." I call it "pure potentiality." There are different ways the void is talked about, and this is one of them. Pure potentiality would necessarily be void if it's pure -- no manifestation at all—pure potential, pure creative impulse.
That doesn't mean that you no longer have a personality, that you no longer have human things about you, that you no longer have a certain kind of principle that orients you—you may even call that an identity. But you no longer find self in identity, and so it's freed up.
When the Buddha says "enlightenment," one way of articulating it is that it's the freedom from identity, from having to be or not be anything. Does that mean you no longer experience the oneness, being everything, seeing the face of God, your true being, or Buddha nature in everything? No, that's still there. Things are still there, but there's no longer identity in them. I don't really know how to describe that, because the nature of it is beyond description. You can't even think about it. It's the borderline between being and nonbeing.
So this is just part of the journey: awakening at the level of mind, heart awakening to the unity of all things, and each one of these provides more spaciousness and openness. Your sense of yourself gets more and more transparent, therefore there's less to defend. There's less necessity to assert yourself in the world, which doesn't mean you are not an assertive being. You can still be a very assertive being.
How does all that translate down into your human experience? There's still a human being there. The human being hasn't started to glow and become incapable of any stupidity. It hasn't suddenly become God's shining example of utter perfection. Each dimension of being exists within its own dimension.
In my experience, what it does is it frees these dimensions up so they're no longer in conflict, and life is no longer about protecting and asserting a kind of ego structure. It's about something different. There are still other dimensions of our humanness that need attention if we want to be able to function well and have what we've realized be able to flow out into all the dimensions of what it is to be a human being.
© Adyashanti 2017
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Falling Away of Self


Adyashanti:

https://marillesblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/experiencing-no-self_qanda.pdf
 
“Oneness is experienced at the level that I call the heart. While the experience of oneness is transformational and profound, it is not itself the experience of no-self, it is the experience of unified, or universal self—self as everything and everyone. The falling away of self is a falling away of even oneness into what is prior to unity. The trajectory is from self experiencing itself as ego, to self experiencing itself as oneness, to self dropping away altogether. What is left cannot be described, because all descriptions are only relevant in terms of their opposites. And beyond self there is no opposite, not even unity or oneness, silence or presence. There is nothing that can be said about it, not even that it is freedom. Where all words fail, that’s where it exists. It is the Pearl beyond price, and it is the only thing that is ever happening or ever could happen. I am not being purposely obscure, I am actually being as direct and concrete as I can.”

“The falling away of self means both the falling away of self and Self, as in True Self. It is beyond both individual self and universal self. And yes, it is beyond all distinctions, categorizations, and descriptions. One cannot open the door to no-self by any means, but one can stop holding the door closed. That is all that is required.”

“It probably sounds pretty bad to have the divine state fall away, and it can be experienced as quite a profound loss. But such a loss is necessary in order for self to fall away and what is beyond self to reveal itself. The problem with the word “self ” is that it is often associated with ego, which it is not. Self as I am using the term is not the ego at all. Self is what enables you to experience the ego state, and the non-ego state alike—as well as divinity, inwardness, outwardness, separation, and unity. All of these experiences happen within, to, and because of self. Self can go from being experienced as profound separation to being experienced as the universal “I am.” It can experience itself as either a separate ego or as God. So self is quite an amazing function. But self does have its limits and it does come to an end. What comes after self is what I am attempting to clarify through this course. Not in order to set up something more to chase, but because more people will be going through this transition in the near future. No-self is not simply an insight after all, and my hope is that this course will be a helpful companion along the way.”

“Self-consciousness is the last form of identity to go, and what goes with it is all the spiritual states of consciousness as well. One of the main reasons why so few people fully make this transition is that they will not let go of all forms of self consciousness and the wonderful forms of expanded experience and identity that go with them. When the “divine within” falls away forever, the movement toward the permanent falling away of self has begun. We only let go completely when we are completely ready to, with no qualifications”

“The question here for you is, what exists in the absence of self ? Not simply in the conceptual absence, as we hear so much silly talk about in modern spirituality, but in the actual lived absence. The absence or emptiness of literally everything reveals the true nature of everything. And the true nature of everything is not only its emptiness but also the true nature of its form, of its existence. From eternity’s point of view, everything is itself; nothing is perceived as either emptiness or form, as existing or not existing. Each moment IS eternity, each thing IS eternity. From the human point of view, this may sound nice but it can in fact be quite stark and shocking. But seen from eternity’s eyes, it all looks quite different.”
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Recent articles by Adyashanti expresses the insight of anatta and total exertion well.
Www.adyashanti.org
What Is the World?
Study Course Q&A
Excerpted from "The Philosophy of Enlightenment"
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
The above Q&A is excerpted from an online study course with Adyashanti. Learn about his current course on the Study Course page.
© Adyashanti 2016



Www.adyashanti.org
No Distinct Self Awakens
Study Course Q&A
Excerpted from “The Way of Liberating Insight”
A participant writes: I have been sensing into awareness, but I have not previously thought of it as the ground of my being; it hasn’t had any spiritual connotation for me. I have, however, experienced it as a quiet alertness, warm, comforting, peaceful and loving, and somehow both young and old. Whenever I relax into it, all the stress goes away and my mood becomes softer.
If there is a problem, it is that I know I am aware but not that I am awareness. I also know that I am not my thoughts or emotions, or even my body. But when I consider I am that which is aware, so far I haven’t seen what “that” is, even though you and others have offered teachings to help me recognize it. I need to see.
Adyashanti: I appreciate your inquiry into the nature of yourself and awareness. It is true that we can never see ourself as a thing, or as an object of awareness. And we certainly cannot ever see awareness; we cannot see our own seeing. But there is a mysterious and profound way in which our true nature recognizes itself -- not as something “out there” that we can see or relate to, but as the totality itself recognizing itself.
Such recognition is intuitive, spontaneous, and immediate. And it happens when we no longer try to recognize ourself as apart from anything, when we are no longer looking for ourself as some piece, or part, or subject of our experiences and our perceptions. For there is no part or distinct subject who awakens; rather, it is the whole or the totality that awakens.
And all along we are the totality. Even our sense of individuality and human uniqueness is itself the totality appearing in a unique way.
The above Q&A is excerpted from an online study course with Adyashanti. Learn about his most recent course on the Study Course page.
© Adyashanti 2015

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