Life itself holds up a mirror for our awakening

Many of us are using our spirituality as a way to avoid life, to avoid seeing things we really need to see, to avoid being confronted with our own misunderstandings and illusions. It is very important to know that life itself is often our greatest teacher. Life is full of grace, sometimes it’s wonderful grace, beautiful grace, moments of bliss and happiness and joy, and sometimes it’s fierce grace, like illness, losing a job, losing someone we love, or a divorce. Some people make the greatest leaps in their consciousness when addiction has them on their knees, for example, and they find themselves reaching out for a different way of being. Life itself has a tremendous capacity to show us truth, to wake us up. And yet, many of us avoid this thing called life, even as it is attempting to wake us up.

The divine itself is life in motion. The divine is using the situations of our lives to accomplish its own awakening, and many times it takes the difficult situations to wake us up.

The irony is that most human beings spend their lives avoiding painful situations. We are not successful, but we are always trying to avoid pain. We have an unconscious belief that our greatest growth in consciousness and awareness comes through beautiful moments. We may, indeed, make great leaps in consciousness through beautiful moments, but I’ d say that most people make their greatest leaps in consciousness in the difficult times.

This is something a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge, that our greatest difficulties, suffering, and pain are a form of fierce grace. They are potent and important components of our awakening, if we’re ready for them. Whether the circumstance is illness, the death of a loved one, divorce, addiction, problems at work, it’s important to face our life situations in order to see the inherent gifts that are available.

I saw that what happens in the body and mind ultimately can’t be avoided. Everything has to be dealt with-everything. Everything has to be seen through.

I tell you this because everybody has a story. We all have our own ways in which life is attempting to hold up a mirror, to squeeze the conditioned self out of us, to squeeze out of us the holding and grasping, to squeeze out all of our beliefs and ideas and concepts and self-images.

If we are willing to look, we will see that life is always in the process of waking us up. If we are not in harmony with life, if we are working in opposition to it, then it is a rough ride indeed.

When we are not willing to see what life is trying to show us, it will keep ramping up the intensity until we are willing to see what we need to see. In this way, life itself is our greatest ally. It is almost a spiritual cliché to say that life is your greatest teacher. We can only know what it means when we have been through it, when we have allowed ourselves to have life hold up a mirror so we can see ourselves clearly.

To think that enlightenment only comes through wonderful experiences is to delude yourself. For most of us, the path to enlightenment is not rosy. We need to acknowledge this, because otherwise we’re only going to let ourselves travel toward that which feels good, that which supports our image of what the path of awakening should be. The truth of the matter is that most people who say they want awakening don’t actually want to awaken. They want their version of awakening. What they actually wants is to be really happy in their dream state. And that’s okay, if that’s as far as they’ve evolved.

The authentic impulse toward enlightenment is that internal prayer asking for whatever it is that will bring us to a full awakening, regardless of whether it turns out to be wonderful or terrible. It is an impulse that puts no conditions on what we have to go through.

This authentic impulse can be a bit frightening, because when you feel it, you know it is real. When you have let go of all conditions you have let go of your illusion of control.

This isn’t a journey about becoming something. This is about to unbecoming who we are not, about undeceiving ourselves. In the end, it’s ironic. We don’t end up anywhere other than where we have always been, except that we perceive where we have always been completely differently. We realize that the heaven everyone is seeking is where we have always been.

 The end of your world. Adyashanti.

Sincerity Is The Key

The most important thing is not that you try to convince anybody of the truth that you see. What is really important is that you are truthful with yourself. If you can be truthful with yourself, then you can be truthful with anybody. There is no real usefulness in becoming overly focused on being truthful with everybody else. Although that´s necessary, the place to start is with yourself: Can you be totally sincere with yourself? Can you go to that place that is beyond blame, beyond judgment, beyond should and shouldn´t? Can you go to that place that is so sincere you won´t shy away from any part of yourself that is still in conflict; you won´t use the perception of truth to hide from something that feels less than liberating?

It is really a question of sincerity. As I said, this is not a self-improvement program. Once you discover the level of sincerity and honesty I am describing, you find that sincerity and honesty are manifestations of the absolute nature of being. To be this sincere with yourself may not be easy, initially. You may see things about yourself you don´t want to see. You may see the parts of yourself that stand in seemingly stark contrast to everything you have realized. Nonetheless, this is where awakening moves: toward and into that which is not awake. Sincerity is what allows this movement to happen, and it does happen if you are real with yourself. 

Sincerity is the key. You have to be willing; you have to want to see everything. When you want to see everything, you will see everything. 

(The End Of Your World. Adyashanti).

www.adyashanti.org

Trascendence As Avoidance

I want to emphasize this. If you avoid those aspects of your life that are not in harmony -those where you may still be in denial- that kind of avoidance is going to hinder your spiritual awakening- In the early stages, it may not have much of an effect. But later, as we get more into the more mature opening of realization, there is no more room for denial. This is something that a lot of people don´t count on. A lot of us think that somehow enlightenment is going to allow us to avoid dealing with those things in ourselves that we find uncomfortable.

Awakening can be the ground from which we meet every person and situation. It can be the ground from which we relate to all the circumstances of life. But this takes a lot of courage and a lot of fearlessness. It also takes something I continue to emphasize: a very simple sincerity. This kind of sincerity arises from that which loves the truth and sees that the truth is the greatest good.

To be anything less than real, to be in avoidance of anything at all, diminishes our experience of who we are. As I often say to my students, to be less than truthful with the people and situations in your life is to withhold the expression of who you are. In the end, we must come to see that truth itself is the highest good, that truth itself is the greatest expression and manifestation of love. Ultimately, love and truth are identical; they are like two sides of a coin. You can´t have truth without love, and you can´t have love without truth.

Awakening calls forth a transformation in both our interior and exterior lives. Again, please don´t think this transformation is about having the perfect life, the perfect job, the perfect mate, the perfect marriage, or the perfect friendship. This is not about perfection; it is about wholeness. It is not about having things exactly as we want them, but about having things exactly as they are. When we allow things to be, a sense of harmony develops; the gap between our realization and who we are as a human being gets smaller and smaller. A seamless continuum begins to emerge between realization and expression, awakening and its actualization.

(The End Of Your World. Adyashanti)

I GOT IT, I LOST IT

With each step you go, you have less and less tendency to look down. You have less tendency to act in ways you know aren´t true or to speak in ways you know aren´t true or do things you know aren´t coming from truth. You start to realize that the consequences have become greater; the more awake we get, the greater the consequences are. Finally, the consequences of acting outside of truth become inmense; the slightest action or behavior that´s not in accordance with the truth can be unbearable to us.

This type of responsability is not something we count on when we imagine awakening. We thinkthat awakening will be a get-out-of-jail-free card. Initially we have a relationship with the spiritual freedom of awakening that is infantile.

We thin that freedom is a personal thing, that it is about feeling extraordinarily good and free. But freedom is much more nuanced than that. It is not a personal thing; it is not an acquisition for us.

As we become more conscious, we begin to see that there are consequences. There are consequences to every thing, and they get bigger and bigger the more we behave in ways that are not in harmony with what we know is true. This is actually a wonderful thing. It is what i call fierce grace. It is not a soft grace; it is not the kind of grace that is beautiful and uplifting. But it is a grace nonetheless. We know that when we act from what is not true, we will only be causing ourselves pain. That knowing is a grace.

Reality is always true to itself. When you´re in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law. To me, this knowledge is a grace. Reality is consistent. Argue with it, go against it, and it will hurt -every single time. It will hurt you, it will hurt others, and it will contribute to the general conflict of all beings.

But this fierceness is also beautiful. It helps orient us deeper and deeper  into our true nature. We realize that to behave from any place other than our true nature is destructive to ourselves and, just as important, to the world and others around us. The more we understand this, the more often we are able to right ourselves when we get off course.

The end of your world. Adyashanti.