Beyond the Mind

Excerpts from Emptiness Dancing by Adyashanti:

The mind can’t fathom that there can be a true intelligence, a transcendent intelligence, that isn’t the product and outcome of thought and conceptual understanding. It can’t fathom that there could be wisdom that’s not going to come at you in the form of thoughts, in the form of acquired and accumulated knowledge.

The true spiritual urge or yearning is always and invitation beyond the mind. That’s why it’s always been said that if you go to God, you go naked or you don’t go at all. It’s the same for everybody. You go in free of your accumulated knowledge, or you are forever unable to enter. So an intelligent mind realizes its own limitation, and it’s a beautiful thing when it does.

When you stop holding on to all the knowledge, then you start to enter a different state of being. You start to move into a different dimension. You move into a dimension where experience inside gets very quiet. The mind may still be there chatting in the background, or it might not, but consciousness is no longer bothering itself with the mind. You don’t need to stop it. Your awareness just goes right past that wall of knowledge and moves into a very quiet state…

…Once your conceptual world of knowledge gets put in its rightful place, it is transcended. You see that you are eternal consciousness now appearing as woman or man, this or that character. But like every good actor, you are not what you are appearing as. Everything that exists is consciousness appearing as, or God appearing as, or Self appearing as, or spirit appearing as. The Buddha called it no-self. When that’s seen, you see Unity. There is only God. That’s all there is: God appearing as floor, as a human being, as a wall, as a chair.

No knowledge, no statement of the Truth touches what’s eternal, what you really are. And no statement about how to get there is true either, because what gets one person there doesn’t get another person there. A mind that likes to look for the one truth path cannot find it. Of course, the mind doesn’t like that. “No right path? Nothing that could be said or read that ultimately, in the end, could be true? The most enlightened being can’t speak the Truth?”

No. It’s never been done, and it never will be done. The only thing you can do is to put a pointer on the way that says, “Look that way.” A false spiritual arrow is one that points to the wall and says, “Look this way.” A true arrow is one that points beyond the wall of concepts.

Our Central Fixation of Self

“Nobody can really explain what the personal self is; we just feel it. It’s a visceral thing. It’s not just how we act and what we say; it’s our central fixation of self. As we see through it, we realize that the personal self is not who we are and that it was not ever anything substantial to begin with. And as we really see into our true nature, there is a paradox that arises: the more we realize that there isn’t a self, the more intimately present we actually are.”

~ Adyashanti, from Emptiness Dancing

How Unimaginably Easy It Would Be

“What is born in awakening is a love of what is—of everything that is. The fact that there is anything at all seems wonderful because when the insight of awakening goes very deep, there is a realization about how tenuous existence is. I don’t simply mean that we could be killed at any moment. I mean we see an unbelievable miracle, we see how unimaginably easy it would be for absolutely nothing to be here. That anything exists at all is seen as an absolute and utter miracle, and from that seeing there is the birth of so much love simply for what is. It’s a different love than when we love getting what we want or we find the perfect partner. This is a love just for the fact that we have shoelaces or for the fact that toenails exist, that kind of love. A tremendous love arises simply for the miracle that is life, realizing that all and everything is the One.”

~ Adyashanti, from Emptiness Dancing

Attention

“Most people give their attention to what they don't like. Put your attention on what you love.”

~ Adyashanti

Unaltered State of Consciousness

"So many people associate meditation with altered states of consciousness. Yet this is a profound misunderstanding about the potential of meditation. The potential I'm talking about is spiritual awakening, awakening to the realization of what you and everything actually is, the oneness of all. We are taught, or we assume, that to perceive everything as one and to perceive yourself as not separate is to enter an altered state of consciousness. And yet, it turns out, the truth is just the opposite. To perceive everything as one is not an altered state of consciousness. It's an unaltered state of consciousness; it's the natural state of consciousness. By comparison, everything else is an altered state."

~ Adyashanti, from True Meditation

In the Absence of Struggle

Call Off the Struggle
by Adyashanti

Most people are in a constant state of struggle with themselves. Tremendously burdened by the past and in constant anticipation of the future, most human beings are rarely able to be fully present for more than very brief moments. The tremendous openness and intimacy that is required to be fully present is beyond most people's ability to sustain for more than a few moments before they habitually contract back into the familiar condition of separateness and struggle that so characterizes the human condition.

This constant state of struggle manifests as a compulsive and addictive relationship to the movement of thought, emotion, and time. There is great reluctance to stop struggling because in the absence of struggle you suddenly begin to lose your boundaries and definitions of who you are. For many people this causes fear to arise as they experience the loss of their familiar sense of self. Struggling is how the ego-personality maintains its existence. When you cease to struggle, identification with the personality begins to break down and you become aware of your emptiness and lack of boundaries.

The most difficult thing for spiritual seekers to do is to stop struggling, striving, seeking and searching. Why? Because in the absence of struggle you don't know who you are: you lose your boundaries; you lose your separateness; you lose your specialness; you lose the dream you have lived all your life.

Eventually you lose everything that your mind has created and awaken to who you truly are: the fullness of freedom, unbound by any identifications, identities, or boundaries. It is this locationless freedom of being that spiritual people are seeking, and at the same time are running away from because its faceless nature gives no fixed reference point for the personality to hold onto or to seek security in.

As long as you remain identified with the personality, you will always be seeking security to the exclusion of the Truth, and will remain in a constant state of struggle. It is only when your love and desire for Truth outweighs the personality's compulsive need for security, that you can begin to stop struggling and be swept up into the arms of an ever unfolding revelation of the Truth and Freedom of Being.

A Dirty Little Secret in the Center of Humanity

"One does not need to go looking for silence. One does not even need to become still. You just realize that everything's swimming in silence. All the sound is swimming in silence. That silence, that's the sound of reality. And a mind that's thinking can never know how silence operates. Silence created everything you see. You look into the stars, you look into the galaxy, it was all created without a thought. Silence did it through no thought. There was another intelligence operating. There was no belief. There was no should, no shouldn't. There were no good ideas or bad ideas. But what was created was of a precision and complexity that minds have been trying to understand for millennia and still can't catch up with it. That's what I mean when I say a mind cannot know what life is like when life is not lived according to the mind. The only thing a mind can know is life lived according to the mind. It can't know otherwise. And when you really touch upon it, what most human beings start to see is that their whole life--and specifically their whole spiritual life--has been a movement away from this--what I call a dirty little secret in the center of humanity. The dirty little secret in the center of humanity is what is true without thought. And there's a great big emptiness, an enormous silence that's just waiting. And you notice that it's the same silence that's looking through your eyes. That which is looking through your eyes actually has no problem. We move into a totally different way of being. A way where being itself instead of thinking is guiding each action."

~ Adyashanti