Adyashanti

Adyashanti

Mukti and Adyashanti

“Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being.” — Adyashanti

Adyashanti is Sanskrit for “primordial peace”. Fitting for a man with such a gentle way about him. The name comes with the promise that you too can bask in the everlasting glow of deep inner peace. Few spiritual seekers would refuse such a gift. All you have to do is follow his lead. Easy enough, right?

Enlightenment is a process of reunion with your Source. Adyashanti first glimpsed Knowledge – his true nature – at the tender age of 25. After six years of growth, introspection and letting go, he completely fell into the depth of his true nature and has been enlightened ever since.

How did he do it? He was a Zen practitioner for 14 years but his awakening is beyond any particular spiritual practice or tradition. After all, some practice Zen their whole lives but fail to reach such heights of consciousness. Many of his peers had been in the service for decades. He once remarked that he did not want to end up like them. Adyashanti realized that his enlightenment was not predicated upon sitting in a particular way or by following a certain teacher.

Adyashanti used journaling as a means of liberating himself from his mind.  He would spend hours deliberating over his deepest thoughts and feelings. This requires radical honesty and a certain amount of courage. Our greatest demons are found within. Not all seekers are ready to face them.

Adyashanti, author of The Way of Liberation, Falling into Grace, True Meditation, and The End of Your World, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence. 

Quotes by Adyashanti

“Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being.”

“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretence. It’s the

complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

“All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.”

“Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?”

“Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.”

“True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer.”

“The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.”

“Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control.”

“You’re no longer separate from that beautiful flow. You no longer have a relationship with life because you are Life.” 

"Truth is the sure knowledge that there is only one reality, infinite and all pervading; the source substance and existence of all created things. Having neither height, breadth, width or duration, it is common to all, and equally so. It is neither asserted nor denied by proofs or the lack of proofs, it is neither mystical nor moral, nor captured by imagination, nor lost in death and decay. Truth exists not in books but is every book, is not captured in words but is every word, is not contained within any manner of creation but is every manner of creation. Truth is that from which there is no otherness, no apart from. It is infinity appearing as this exact moment. Truth is the knowing and the knowledge of itself from within itself, for there is nothing that can know the truth but truth itself." -Adyashanti

As a teenager, Steven Gray immersed himself in the world of Zen Buddhism, hoping it would spark an awakening of consciousness. It worked, and over time, he realized that putting labels on everything and everybody forces us to live in an abstraction rather than develop a direct connection with the present moment. No longer identifying with a specific faith and changing his name to Adyashanti (meaning “primordial peace” in Sanskrit), the author explains why throwing away names brings us more in touch with an important spiritual understanding. As a teenager, Steven Gray immersed himself in the world of Zen Buddhism, hoping it would spark an awakening of consciousness. It worked, and over time, he realized that putting labels on everything and everybody forces us to live in an abstraction rather than develop a direct connection with the present moment. No longer identifying with a specific faith and changing his name to Adyashanti (meaning “primordial peace” in Sanskrit), the author explains why throwing away names brings us more in touch with an important spiritual understanding.

 Enlightenment Story

All identity had collapsed, as both the self in the ego sense of a separate me, and as the slightest twinge of identity with the Absolute Self, with the Oneness of consciousness. There had still been some unconscious, identity or “me-ness” which was the cause of the discontent. And it all collapsed. Identity itself collapsed, and from that point on there was no grasping whatsoever for little me or for the unified consciousness me. Identity just fell away and blew away with the wind.

That is what I call liberation. Really, in the end, what you end up with is that you don’t know who you are. You end up in the same place you started out. You truly don’t know who you are because it’s impossible to fixate the self anywhere.

Thus spoke Adyashanti ...

“The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda.”

“Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?”

 “Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.”

 “The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.”

 “In the end it’s all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don’t.”

 “Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.”

 “Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline; concentration is a way in which we are actually directing or guiding or controlling our experience. Meditation is letting go of control, letting go of guiding our experience in any way whatsoever. The foundation of True Meditation is that we are letting go of control.” 

.

 “Time to cash in your chips

put your ideas and beliefs on the table.

See who has the bigger hand

you or the Mystery that pervades you.

Time to scrape the mind's shit

off your shoes

undo the laces

that hold your prison together

and dangle your toes into emptiness.

Once you've put everything

on the table

once all of your currency is gone

and your pockets are full of air

all you've got left to gamble with

is yourself.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top

of the highest stakes table.

Place yourself as the bet.

Look God in the eyes

and finally

for once in your life

lose.”

 Adyashanti, author of The Way of Liberation, Falling into Grace, True Meditation, and The End of Your World, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.

Asked to teach in 1996 by his Zen teacher of 14 years, Adyashanti offers teachings that are free of any tradition or ideology. “The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine, but is open to all and found within all.”

Mukti and Adya Based in California, Adyashanti lives with his wife, Mukti, Associate Teacher of Open Gate Sangha. He teaches throughout North America and Europe, offering satsangs, weekend intensives, silent retreats, and a live internet radio broadcast.

“Adyashanti” means primordial peace.

 “When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.”

 “Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

 “We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.”

“The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.”

“Effortless doesn’t mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this “effortless effort.” We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.”

 “When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.”

 “The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.”

 “If you strip it of all the complex terminology and all the complex jargon, enlightenment is simply returning to our natural state of being. A natural state, of course, means a state which is not contrived, a state that requires no effort or discipline to maintain, a state of being which is not enhanced by any sort of manipulation of mind or body—in other words, a state that is completely natural, completely spontaneous.”

 “Whatever you think you are, that’s not it.”

 “We can only start to allow consciousness to wake up from its identification with thought and feeling, with body and mind and personality, by allowing ourselves to rest in the natural state from the very beginning.”

“Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.”

 “As long as you are trying to become, trying to get somewhere, trying to attain something, you are quite literally moving away from the Truth itself.”

 “Ego is nothing more than the beliefs, ideas, and images we have about ourselves—and so it is actually”

  “Religion’s primary function is to awaken within us the experience of the sublime and to connect us with the mystery of existence.”

 “Ultimate Reality is not a certain state of consciousness, no matter how wonderful or blissful. Reality is the ground of all being, unborn and undying eternity. It is as present in one experience or state of consciousness as in any other. Reality, or Truth, is that which is ultimately true in all states, at all times, in all locations.”

True Meditation

True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer. All methods aiming at achieving a certain state of mind are limited, impermanent, and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial awareness.

True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not being manipulated or controlled. When you first start to meditate, you notice that attention is often being held captive by focus 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 and tries to control 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 (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, 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 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.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.