Adyashanti Quotes

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.

Grace is all aroudn us, if we only have the eyes to see it.

We're always held in the divine presence always.

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

Do not seek after what you yearn for,
seek after the source of the yearning itself.

There is no outside of you.
It's all an inside game.

As soon as you believe that a label 
you've put on yourself is true,
you've limited something that is literally limitless,
you've limited who you are into nothing but a thought.

It is one thing to realize the Self
it is something else altogether to embody that realization 
to the extent that there is no gap between inner revelation and its outer expression.

Make no mistake about it - 
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.

The real void is not the one you're looking at
It's the one you'are looking from.

Instead of striving towards some distant goal that 
you will never reach, 
I invite you to stop and ask: 
How am I avoiding the enlightenment that is already present in each moment?
How am I seeing separation where it doesn’t exist?”

Eternity knows no history. Eternity is the eternal presence.

The mind may accept or deny that you are awareness, 
but either way it can’t really understand.
It cannot comprehend. 
Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.

This awake silence is available to anyone in this moment. 
All you have to do is stop using your mind to look for it. It doesn't know where to find it.

When we start to suffer, 
it tells us something very valuable. 
It means that we are not seeing the truth, 
and we are not relating from the truth. 
It's a beautiful pointer. It never fails.

Many Sages have said, 
“Your world is a dream. You’re living in an illusion.” 
They’re referring to this world of the mind and 
the way we believe our thoughts about reality. 
When we see the world through our thoughts, 
we stop experiencing life as it really is 
and others as they really are.

When someone says, “I love you,” 
he is telling you about himself, not you. 
When someone says, “I hate you,” 
she is telling you about herself, not you. 
World views are self views—literally.

True sincerity reveals a powerful form of clarity 
and discernment that is necessary 
in order to perceive yourself honestly 
without flinching or being held 
captive by your conditioned mind's judgments and defensiveness.

Suffering is how Life tells you that 
you are resisting or misperceiving 
what is real and true. 
It is the way Life suggests that 
you are not in harmony with what is.

Thoughts in your head are really no different than 
the sound of a bird outside. 
It is just that you decide that they are more or less relevant.

Enlightenment is the unaltered state of consciousness.

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 this moment, there is always freedom and 
there is always peace. 
This moment in which you experience 
stillness is every moment. 
Don't let the mind seduce you into the past or future. 
Stay in the moment, and dare to consider that you can be free now.

The truth is that you already are what you are seeking.

Truth is not over there, wherever over there is. 
Truth is neither housed in religious rituals 
nor secret doctrines, nor in a guru's touch or
beatific smile, nor in exotic locations 
or ancient temples. 
Truth is quite literally the only thing that does exist. 
It is not hidden but in plain view, 
not lacking but abundantly present.

When you inquire 'Who am I?' if you are honest,
you'll notice that it takes you right back to silence instantly. 
The brain doesn't have an answer, 
so all of a sudden there is silence.

Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, 
the innocent state of consciousness, 
that state which is uncontaminated 
by the movement of thought, 
uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind.

All is always well 
All is always well even when 
it seems unbelievably unwell

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

Question your thoughts.
Question your stories. 
Question your assumptions. .
Question your opinions. 
Question your conclusions. 
Question them all into utter emptiness, stillness and joy.
The keys to freedom are in your hands. Use them.

Actually, all paths lead away from the truth...
how's that? All paths. 
There's no such thing as a path to the truth. 
The truth's already here, where are you going?

Awareness isn't something we own; 
awareness isn't something we possess.
Awareness is actually what we are.

Our yearning for truth
actually comes from truth.

Whatever you resist you become. 
If you resist anger, you are always angry. 
If you resist sadness, you are always sad. 
If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. 
If you resist confusion,you are always confused. 
We think that we resist certain states because 
they are there, but actually they are there 
because we resist them.

The biggest embrace of love you’ll ever make 
is to embrace yourself completely. 
Then you’ll realize you’ve just embraced the whole universe,
and everything and everybody in it.

The paradox is that when resistance is fully accepted, 
the resistance disappears.

The true heart of all human beings 
is the lover of what is.

This awake silence is available 
to anyone in this moment. 
All you have to do is stop using your mind to look for it. 
It doesn't know where to find it.

What if you let go of every bit of control
and every urge that you have,
right down to the most infinitesimal urge to control anything, anywhere, including anything that may be happening with you at this moment? 
Imagine that you were able to completely and absolutely give up control on every level. 
If you were able to give up control absolutely, totally, and completely, then you would be a spiritually free being.

When you let go of the egoic self
what you're getting in exchange is
the whole universe.

The Truth doesn't answer anything.
The Truth is everything.

Now don't think that awakening is the end. 
Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, 
but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature.

When you realize what you are now,
the issue of death will sovle itself.

Be still.
Question every thought.
Contemplate the source of Reality.
and keep your eyes open. You never know when something that seems entirely insignificant will split your whole world wide open into eternal delight.

To be lost in not knowing 
is a wonderful place to be. 
When you're lost in not knowing, 
you come to know, 
but not in the way that you knew before. 
You come to know 
as a moment-to-moment experience of being. 
That's your knowing. 
And you know that That is who you really are. 
You are that ever-unfolding mystery beyond the mind.

Life itself is often our greatest teacher. Life is full of grace.
Each experience we have is the divine invitation.
It may be a beautifully engraved invitation, 
or it may be a very fierce invitation, but each moment is the invitation.
Our illusions—the beliefs we hold on to—
are the very doorways to our freedom. 
we see that our emotional life is a portal. 
It offers an invitation to look deeply, to look from the awakened state—
a state that is not trying to change or alter anything, 
but is itself a lover of truth. 
Each moment is the moment that needs to be happening. 
The texture and flow of our lives, from moment to moment, 
is itself what reveals freedom. 
Life itself shows us what we need to see through in order to be free.

The journey of awakening is not just the journey of waking up, 
being free of self, and realizing that life as we knew it was a dream. 
It is also a reentering, coming back down from the summit 
of the mountain, as it were. Quite surprisingly, upon reentry,
life becomes very simple and ordinary. 
We no longer feel driven to have extraordinary moments, 
to have transcendent experiences. 
Sitting at the table in the morning and drinking a cup of tea is experienced as a full expression of ultimate reality. 
The cup itself is a full expression of everything we have realized. 
Walking down the hallway,
each step is a complete expression of the deepest realization. 
Raising a family, dealing with children, going to work, going on vacation 
- all of it is a true expression of that which is inexpressible.

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

We let go into this grace. It’s something we fall into, like when we fall into the arms of another, or we put our head on the pillow to go to sleep. It’s a willingness to relax, even in the midst of tension. It’s a willingness to stop for just a moment, to breathe, to notice that there’s something else going on other than the story our mind is telling us. In this moment of grace, we see that whatever might be there in our experience, from the most difficult emotional challenges to the most causeless joy, occurs within a vast space of peace, of stillness, of ultimate well-being.

We begin to awaken from this dream of separateness and struggle, and we realize that the grace we were always seeking is actually right there at the center of our own existence. This is the heart of spiritual awakening: to realize that what we have always yearned for is the very thing, in our deepest source, that we have always been. Freedom is always available to us. In those very moments when we know we don’t know, when we take the backward step, heart wide open, we fall into grace.

When we begin to look at our experience clearly, 
we’ll see that there are at least two phenomena going on: 
one is the movement of mind, 
including all of the descriptions, 
self-images, ideas, beliefs, and opinions 
that arise moment to moment. 
The other phenomenon is the awareness of mind. 
Very rarely do we take into account the awareness of mind, 
the space in which mind arises and subsides.

You can have the thought of a glass of water, but if you're thirsty, 
you can't drink the thought. You can think about a glass of water 
until you die, but to actually pick up a physical glass and
drink the water is a totally different experience.
A thought has no truthfulness to it. 
As we awaken on the level of mind, we begin to perceive from 
beyond the mind. We realize that the mind itself is empty of reality.
It‟s radical to see that 
our whole sense of self and the world is created in the mind. 
When we see that the structure of tho

ught holds no intrinsic reality,
we come to see that 
the world as we perceive it, through the mind, can‟t have any reality. This is earthshaking; 
the self that we perceive ourselves to be has no reality.

One Zen master said,
The whole universe is my true personality.
This is a very wonderful saying...
If you want to see what you truly are,
open the window, and everything you see is in fact the expression 
of you inner reality. Can you embrace all of it?

Are you the image you project and relate to each other?

STANDING IN YOUR OWN AUTHORITY

Nobody told us that what we are is a point of awareness, or pure spirit. This isn’t something we’re taught. Rather, what we were taught was to identify with our name. We were taught to identify with our birth date. We were taught to identify with the next thought that we have. We were taught to identify with all the memories our mind collects about the past. But all that was just teaching; all that was just more thinking. When you stand in your own authority, based in your own direct experience, you meet that ultimate mystery that you are. Even though it may be at first unsettling to look into your own no-thingness, you do it anyway. Why? Because you no longer want to suffer. Because you’re willing to be disturbed. You’re willing to be amazed. You’re willing to be surprised. You’re willing to realize that maybe everything you’ve ever thought about yourself really isn’t true.

When you’re open to all that, then and only then can you stand in your own authority, on your own two feet. Only then can you really look for yourself underneath the mind and into the space between the next thoughts, to see clearly that what we are exists before we think about it. What you are exists before you name it. What you are exists before you even call it “male” or “female.” What you are exists before we say “good” or “bad,” “worthy” or “unworthy.” What you are is more fundamental than what you say you are. What you really are is quite a surprise when you see it for the first time, when you feel it. You can start to feel your own transparency. You begin to recognize that it’s possible that you really aren’t a “someone” after all, even though the thoughts of a “someone” arise, even though in your life you often act as if you’re someone. It’s the way you get along in life. You respond to your name, you go to work, you do your job, you call yourself a husband or a wife or a sister or a brother. All of these are names we give to each other. All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they’re true. As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing more than a thought.

IMAGINING OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Let’s look at how we form an image of ourselves out of nothing, because that’s actually what we’re doing. Out of this vast inner space of quiet and awareness, we form an image of ourselves, an idea of ourselves, a collection of thoughts about ourselves—this is something that we’re taught to do when we’re very young. We’re given a name, we’re given a gender. We acquire experience as we go through life, as we go through the ups and downs of what it is to be a human being; with each event that happens, the ideas we have about ourselves change. Bit by bit, we accumulate ideas of who we imagine ourselves to be. In a rather short time, by the time we’re five or six years old, we have the rudimentary building blocks of a self-image. Image is something that, in our culture, we value very highly. We pamper our image, we clothe our image, we try to imagine ourselves to be more or better or sometimes even less than we really are. In short, we live in a culture in which the image we project to ourselves and to others is held as a very high value.

I remember when I was studying psychology in college and one of the topics was the importance of a good, healthy self-image. I was fascinated by the subject, and one day it occurred to me: “Image? Good image, bad image, it’s just an image!” I realized that what we were being taught was to go from having a negative image of ourselves to a good image of ourselves. Of course, if we’re going to stay in the realm of images, of believing that we’re an idea or an image, then it’s better to have a good image of ourselves than it is to have a negative image of ourselves. But if we’re beginning to look at the core and the root of suffering, we start to see that an image is just that: It’s an image. It’s an idea. A set of thoughts. It’s literally a product of imagination. It’s who we imagine ourselves to be. 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.

So in effect, we are all walking around presenting an image to each other, and we’re relating to each other as images. Whoever we think somebody else is, it’s just an image we have in our mind. When we relate to each other from the standpoint of image, we’re not relating to who each other is, we’re just relating to our imagination of who each other is. Then we wonder why we don’t relate so well, why we get into arguments, and why we misunderstand each other so deeply.

Everybody knows how painful it is and how much suffering it causes to walk around with a bad self-image. Almost all of us, either consciously or unconsciously, are in some process of trying to feel better about ourselves. It’s very common that once you get through the façade of most human beings, what you find at the core is a feeling that the image they have of themselves is insufficient and not good enough. It’s an image that seems in some way wounded—and it can never quite capture the essence of that person.

But there’s something deeper going on here; there’s a possibility of looking at image in a whole new way, from an entirely different vantage point. Allow yourself to see that your self-image is just an image—not reality, not the truth, not who we really are. We can think we’re pretty good, or we can think we’re really not so worthy, but either way, both of those conclusions are based on an image we have in our minds, which is something that we’ve inherited and created based on influences from our society, our culture, our friends, our parents, anyone with whom we’ve ever engaged. As we grow up, we gain the ability to re-create this self-image, but when we’re young, society, parents, and culture condition us with an image of ourselves. When we transition out of childhood, we try to change our image—because we decide it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t feel quite right. It is like an old piece of clothing that we don’t want to wear anymore. So we try something else on; we create new images, new illusions of who we imagine ourselves to be. But whatever this image is, when we look deep down in the core of all images, there is this feeling that we’re faking it, this sense that we hope we don’t get caught, because we’re not really being who we are, that we really don’t know who we are.

When I was quite young and I looked out at the world around me, I remember thinking, “Hey, everybody else seems to know who they are.” Whether it was my friends or my parents, whether it was people whom I met as I went through life, I had this feeling that everybody seemed to know who they were, and they seemed to know what they were doing, with a fair amount of certainty. But as for myself, I felt like I was faking it. What I didn’t realize was that everybody else was faking it, too! It looked like almost nobody else was faking it but me. But really, when I began to talk to more people about it, when I began to listen to what people said and how they said it, I began to realize that more people were faking being themselves than I had ever imagined.

THE DISCOVERY OF NO-IMAGE

If we’re living from the standpoint of a self-image of who we think we are, who we imagine ourselves to be, this also creates an emotional environment. For example, if we think we’re good and worthy, we’ll create good and worthy emotions. But if we think we’re unworthy, then we’ll create negative emotions. So we can have a good or bad self-image, a self-image that feels emotionally either better or worse, but no matter what it is, if we look deeply at the core of all our images, there is this feeling of not being authentic, not being real. There’s a reason for this. It’s because as long as we’re taking ourselves to be an image in our minds, we can’t ever feel completely sufficient. We can’t feel completely worthy. Even if the image is positive, we don’t feel completely enlivened.

If we’re willing to look in a deep way underneath the appearances, what we expect to discover—or perhaps hope to discover—is some great, shining image. Most people, deep in their unconscious, want to find an idea of themselves, an image of themselves, that’s really good, quite wonderful, quite worthy of admiration and approval. Yet, when we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea of yourself, and you don’t insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it’s just an image, it’s just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Because this is so unexpected, most people will move away from it almost instinctively. They’ll move right back into a more positive image. But if we really want to know who we are, if we want to get to the bottom of this particular way in which we suffer, arising from believing ourselves to be something we’re not, then we have to be willing to look underneath the image, underneath the idea that we have of each other, and most specifically of ourselves.

What is the experience of feeling and knowing yourself as no image, no idea, no notion at all? At first, it might be disorienting or confusing. Your mind might think, “But there’s got to be an image! I have to have a mask to wear. I’ve got to present myself as somebody or something, or in some particular way.” But of course, that’s just the mind, that’s just conditioned thinking. It’s really just the incarnation of fear, because there is a fear of knowing what we really are. Because when we look into what we really are—underneath our ideas, underneath our images—there’s nothing. There’s no image at all.

There’s a Zen koan—a riddle that you can’t answer with your mind, but that you can only answer through looking directly for yourself—that says, “What was your true face before your parents were born?” So of course, if your parents weren’t born yet, then you weren’t born yet, and if you weren’t born, then you didn’t have a body, you didn’t have a mind. So if you weren’t born, you couldn’t conceive of an image for yourself. It’s a way, in a riddle, of asking: What are you, really, when you look beyond all images and all ideas about yourself, when you look absolutely directly, right here and right now, when you stand completely within yourself and look underneath the mind, underneath the ideas, underneath the images? Are you willing to enter that space, the place that casts no image, no idea? Are you really willing and ready to be that free and that open?

Technique:What or Who am I?

Before we actually find out what we are, we must first find out what we are not. Otherwise our assumptions will continue to contaminate the whole investigation. We could call this the way of subtraction. In the Christian tradition, they call this the Via Negativa, the negative path. In the Hindu tradition of Vedanta, they call this Neti-neti, which means “not this, not that.” These are all paths of subtraction, ways of finding out what we are by finding out what we are not.

We start by looking at the assumptions we have about who we are. We all have many, many assumptions that we don’t even realize we have. And so we start to look at the simplest things about ourselves. For example, we look at our minds and we notice that there are thoughts. Clearly there is something or someone that is noticing the thoughts. You may not know what it is, but you know it’s there. Thoughts come and go, but that which is witnessing the thoughts remains.

If thoughts come and go, then they aren’t really what you are. Starting to realize that you are not your thoughts is very significant, since most people assume they are what they think. They believe they are their thoughts. Yet a simple look into your own experience reveals that you are the witness of your thoughts. Whatever thoughts you have about yourself aren’t who and what you are. There is something more primary that is watching the thoughts.

In the same way, there are feelings. We all have emotional feelings: happiness, sadness, anxiety, joy, peace. We have feelings in the body, be they feelings of energy—a contraction here, an openness there—or just an itch on your toe. There are various feelings, and then there is the witness of those feelings. Something is witnessing or taking note of every feeling you have. So you have feelings, and you have the awareness of feelings. Feelings come and go, but the awareness of feelings remains. And although we need not deny any feeling we experience, it is important to notice that our deepest and truest identity is not a feeling. It cannot be, because there is something more primary before feelings arise: awareness of feelings.

The same is true for beliefs. We have many beliefs, and we have the awareness of those beliefs. They may be spiritual beliefs, beliefs about your neighbor, beliefs about your parents, beliefs about yourself (which are usually the most damaging), beliefs about a whole variety of things. Beliefs are thoughts that we assume to be true. We can all see that our beliefs have changed as we’ve grown, as we move through a lifetime. Beliefs come and go, but the awareness of beliefs stands before the beliefs; it is more primary. It is easy to see, then, that we cannot be our beliefs. Beliefs are something we witness, something we watch, something we notice. But beliefs do not tell us who the watcher is; they do not tell us who the noticer is. The watcher or the noticer, the witness, stands before the beliefs.

The same thing goes for our ego-personality. Everybody has an ego, and everybody has a personality. We tend to think that we are our egos, that we are our personalities. And yet, just as with thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, we can come to see that there is a witness to our ego-personality. There’s an ego-personality called “you” and then there is a watching of the ego-personality, an awareness of the ego-personality. The awareness of the ego-personality stands before the personality; it is noticing it, without judging, without condemning.

Here we’ve started to move into something more intimate. Most people believe they are their egos and their personalities. But a simple willingness to look into your experience reveals that there is personality, and then there is the witness of personality. Therefore your essential, deepest nature cannot be your personality. Your ego-personality is being watched by something more primary; it is being witnessed by awareness.

With that, we arrive at awareness itself. We notice that there is awareness. Everybody has awareness. If you are reading these words right now, it is awareness that is actually taking this in. You are aware of what you think. You are aware of how you feel. So awareness is clearly present. It is not something that needs to be cultivated. Awareness is not something that needs to be manufactured. Awareness simply is. It is that which makes it possible to know, to experience what is happening.

Who Is Aware?

Generally we think, unconsciously, that “I am aware,” that I am the one that is awareness, that awareness is something that belongs to me. We presume there is some entity called “me” who is aware. Yet when we start to investigate this meditatively, quietly, simply, we start to see that while there is awareness, we can’t actually find the “I” or the “me” who is aware. We start to see that this is an assumption that the mind has been taught to make, that “I” am the one who is aware. When you turn inside and look for who’s aware, what is aware, you can’t find an “it.” There’s just more awareness. There isn’t a “me” or an “I” who is aware.

In this way we are still subtracting our identity through this deep investigation. Through looking at what we are not, we are actually pulling our identity out of thought, feeling, persona, ego, body, mind. We are pulling our identity back out of the exterior elements of our experience into its essential nature. No sooner do we get back to awareness itself than we encounter the primary assumption that “I am the one who is aware.” So we investigate that assumption. As we investigate it, through our experience, we discover time and time again that we cannot find out who it is that is aware. Where is this “I” that is aware? It is at this precise moment—the moment when we realize that we cannot find an entity called “me” who owns or possesses awareness—that it starts to dawn on us that maybe we ourselves are awareness itself. Awareness isn’t something we own; awareness isn’t something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.

Now for some people—for most people—this will sound radical. This is because we are so used to identifying ourselves with our thoughts, with our feelings, with our beliefs, with our egos, with our bodies, and with our minds. We are actually taught to identify with these things. Yet through our investigation we start to see that something stands before thought, before personality, before beliefs—something that we are calling awareness itself. It can flash upon us through this investigation that we are awareness itself.

This does not mean that there are not thoughts. It doesn’t mean that there’s not a body. We’re not in denial of ego or personality or belief or anything else. This is not a denial of all these exterior elements of our human self. We’re simply discovering our essential nature. Bodies and minds and beliefs and feelings are like clothing that awareness puts on, and we are finding out what is underneath this clothing. It can be quite transformative to realize that you are not what you thought you were, that you are not your beliefs, that you are not your personality, that you are not your ego. You are something other than that, something that resides on the inside, at the innermost core of your being. For the moment we are calling that something “awareness” itself. The radical nature of this insight is not that awareness is something you possess, or that you need discipline or need to learn how to do. Awareness is actually what you are; it’s the essence of your being. And not only is awareness what you are, it is also what everyone else is, too.

That’s why we call this a transcendent recognition, a transcendent revelation. It’s actually our identity waking up from the prison of separation to its true state.

No matter how old or young you are, notice that throughout your life things have changed: your body has changed, your mind has changed, your ego has changed, your beliefs have changed, your personality has changed. All of it has been in a state of flux over many years. But all along, from the time you attained language, you always referred back to yourself as “I”: “I am this. I think that. I believe this. I believe that. I want this. I want that.” While everything else has changed and continues to change, the “I” that you refer to has always been there. When you say “I,” it is the same “I” now as when you were a little child. The exteriors have changed. The thoughts have changed. The body has changed. The feelings have changed. But the “I” has not. On the level of intuition, there is a knowing that remains the same as it ever was, and you refer to it every time you say “I.” Without you even recognizing it, that’s the part of you that’s divine. That’s the sacred part. That’s your essential nature. But that “I” has no form and no shape. It is of the nature of awareness and spirit. And so anybody can notice for themselves and within themselves that this sense of “I” has been there all along.

The great twentieth-century Indian sage Ramana Maharshi had a saying, “Let what comes come; let what goes go. Find out what remains.” Meditative self-inquiry is a way of finding out what remains, what has always been.

Technique:Fire of Truth

When you listen deeply, feel intimately, and allow yourself to experience this moment exactly as it is, the emotional and energetic bodies soften. Take a few minutes now to just listen to and become aware of your surroundings. As you let the sounds become known, also become aware of the scent and the feel of the space around you in and outside of the room so that your feeling sense isn't confined to your skin and bones. Give yourself an opportunity to be open to the environment of sound and a sense of the space outside your body.

Notice that the more you relax, these sounds and experiences penetrate you and flow into you without defense. You will feel yourself softening and opening. Invite yourself into this openness. You may find that the sense of a barrier between the outside world and what's happening inside your skin becomes very transparent, or you may feel as if you can't find the boundary between inside and outside. Experiences of outside noise and what is happening in your body become of the same quality. A feeling in your body isn't really different than the sound of a car driving by or a bird in the trees. A feeling in your body is not really any more yours than the feeling of the space in the room where you sit. Notice that if you begin to take ownership of any experience, this starts to divide the world into inner and outer, mine and theirs, an outside sound and me. But essentially it's all just experience, inside or outside, the same. Not mine and not other than mine.

The presence of stillness opens the body and soaks into you like a sponge, if you allow it. A silent understanding happens that is not in words but is the direct experience of what is. Allow yourself the great gift of not looking for some alternate experience. Without thinking about it, without the movement of a single thought, what is it that experiences this? What is it that experiences?

Recognize that there is nothing that experiences this moment, but even that nothing is known and experienced. There is something mysterious that knows, something mysterious that experiences in this moment, but you can't say what it is because, when you say what it is, it's not that. It's closer, more immediate. As soon as you think about it, you see it's not that thought. It's before the thought. No description is necessary, so just rest on the edge, on the precipice, on the direct experience, directly feeling as though you do not exist and yet knowing that you do.

One thought about this mystery sets apart heaven and hell. Thought rips the unity into pieces to be analyzed by the mind. But silence unifies. The experience of this moment is present but ungraspable, known but not definable. This that is awake cannot be caught. You can sacrifice that vain attempt to define and grasp it, and instead just let it go. Maybe you are not you after all. Maybe you are this that is awake inside of this very moment of experience. Find a willingness to be it, rather than know it. As the body opens, sounds still flow through silence. What in you knows itself as silence? This is undefinable. If you lose your way, listen again to the sounds. They will point back to the silence, which will point back to that which knows both silence and sound. Don't get lost in thought or you miss your life. Just simply relax, and relax, and relax. It's the simplest act of faith and trust.

This awakeness that is awake within you knows itself. The mind does not know it, the body does not know it, and emotions do not know it. This awakeness only knows itself as itself. This truth is simple, beyond all comprehension. It is immediate, before all seeking. It is ever present, displaying itself as every single facet of this experience right now.

The Radiant Core - Openness

Sometimes people ask me, "If I realize that I as a separate identity don't really exist as I thought I did, then who is going to live this life?" Once you touch upon this radiant heart of emptiness, then you know what is living this life, what has always lived it, and what is going to live it from this moment on. You realize that you are not living this life; this radiant heart is what is actually living this life—along with this radiant, empty mind. When you give up being who you thought you were and let yourself be who you really are, then this radiant heart lives your life. Then no-thingness becomes your reality, and nondual awareness is what you are.

A great way to think about and explain the true nature of every person (which is all the concept of enlightenment is ever really pointing to) is to say that when true nature is birthed into full consciousness, your mind is open as far as it can go. It doesn't mean your thoughts expand into the cosmos, it means your mind is so open that there are no edges to it. You notice that as soon as you grasp a thought and believe it, the mind closes down onto that thought. So the natural mind is an open mind, and the natural heart is open, come what may. That's the shock of our natural condition—the mind and heart are naturally open and do not know how to close under any conditions at any time. And at the same time, you are beyond even the open mind and heart. Everything is contained within what you are.

The conditioned mind is always taking on God's job, wondering what people are doing and why they do it. But that is none of your business, none of your concern. You can just start walking through life with this natural openness to what is and be that way under all conditions at all times. That's what the true Self has been doing all along. When your true nature is realized, it is not as if you will have some amazing experience, and after that you say, "Okay world, I'm ready." The deepest experience is when you realize that this open, radiant, empty mind and open, radiant heart have always been open. They don't need to open; they are not going to open; openness has always been here. You no longer see two, you see the One in and as everything.

People feel so vulnerable and put up defenses. But putting up defenses is like walking out into the starry night and trying to wrap a little coat around vast infinite space. The vastness just flies out through the arms and the hood. You have this silly little coat out in the vast space and protect yourself inside it and think maybe someday you will open the buttons and be spiritually liberated. Probably not. It's more likely that someday you will stop identifying with the silly little coat. Free yourself of all limiting identities and embrace the infinite.

What allows this opening to take place at a great depth is to realize we are already the openness into which we are opening. If we keep identifying with the human aspect of ourselves, we think, "My God, I am opening into something too big for me." When we really let go and fall into this open silence, we can't find any end to it. It has been eternally here from before the beginning and, in that, our humanness finds a welcoming to open itself. This is so because we are not opening ourselves into a mystery that is alien, or foreign, or different, but into what we have always been.

If you touch the sacred quality of winter inside yourself—that quality of everything returning to its most essential form—you find yourself falling off the end of the mind and into openness. You will start to experience this by not resisting the wintertime and just going with it as it opens you. It can be tremendously revealing, tremendously liberating to just return, return, return. It takes courage to do this. You want to ask, "Who will I be? Will it all be okay?" But just return to the essential. When you find the courage to allow yourself to return to the essential, you are actually returning to the very root of your own self. That's the fullness that the winter has to offer.

It's as if you return all the way to the seed, and only there do you see that the seed contained the whole truth. When you reach the core of your own being, then you realize that the seed, which seemed very empty when you opened it, is full of the potential of everything that is. Like the seed of a tree, everything that the tree will ever become is contained in that seed. Only in the full return does a full springtime become possible.

These are not ideals I speak about, not goals or potentials. This openness is actually the core of who everybody is. Stop waiting to let go of everything, and then your true nature is realized. When it is realized, then live it. When the living of it happens, life happens spontaneously. Then finally, for once in our lives, we can say with honesty and integrity that it is the most amazing mystery. It is unfathomable. You cannot know it. You can only be it, either consciously or unconsciously. But to be it consciously is a whole lot easier than to be it unconsciously. Realize yourself and be free.

-Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing