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?

-Adyashanti

“Your life, all of your life, is your path to awakening. By resisting or not dealing with its challenges, you stay asleep to Reality.” Adyashanti

Something I find fascinating about the Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata is that the characters sporadically move from addressing Kṛṣṇa as an embodied mortal (as their friend, cousin, son-in-law etc) to addressing him as the Godhead; as Viṣṇu, as the Supreme Being, and as Īśvara. The succession of change between the modes of address can sometimes even happen on the same page, at a distance of a few lines. The veil is lifted, and the characters see through Kṛṣṇa’s illusion, and, through that, they become immersed in the nature of Reality; the veil promptly drops back, and God is lost. An argument for this could be that the divine modes of address are interpolations, a theory being that Kṛṣṇa became identified with Viṣṇu only in later renditions of the Mahābhārata. While this could be true at the level of historical analysis of the epic, for me, there is a subtler teaching encased here: how all of us, without exception, glimpse into the nature of Reality as we move through life, yet we perpetually proceed to return to becoming engrossed in the superimpositions we project upon Reality; and the dance continues. From Truth to dream, from dream to Truth. It is quite endearing, really. What committed and imaginative dreamers we are!

Adyashanti once talked about how one inadvertently glimpses truth; it is, after all, inescapable as it is our nature; the trick is not forgetting / losing the glimpse.

Gorgeous artwork of Kṛṣṇa: Awedict.

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.

Adyashanti

art by Caspar David Friedrich

The great spiritual author Alan Watts had a wonderful image. He said when a boat goes through the water, it leaves a wake in the water as it passes through. The way we understand things psychologically would be that the wake actually creates the boat, that the past is what creates the present moment. But of course, we know that the wake isn’t creating the boat; the boat is creating the wake. It’s the present moment that is creating the past. The present moment is what’s knifing through the water and the wake is just the recording of the present moment moving farther and farther into the past.

So if you look at it from that standpoint, the past doesn’t actually create the present even though it seems like the past is what gives us our present experience, which conditions the way we see life. There’s actually another way to see it, and that’s what the spiritual orientation is. The spiritual orientation is rooted in the revelation or the perception that there’s only right here and right now. And even deeper than that is that everything you think and feel and experience right here and right now is not actually the outcome of the past. It’s actually the spontaneous bursting into existence of the present. In a way it’s uncaused.

We’re taught to view life through the orientation that the past creates the present. The “here and now” orientation doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. And yet, not only in the realm of spirituality, but also in the realm of science and quantum mechanics, we start to see that life actually bursts forth uncaused, seemingly out of nowhere, seemingly out of nothingness. This is what some of our physics and physicists have observed, that the smallest particles of matter actually seem to burst out of nowhere, out of nothingness, and on an even more perplexing level, that our observation of life is what actually brings life into being.

This is really the deeper meaning of “spontaneous.” Spontaneity means uncaused. It’s not following the laws of causation. At the subatomic level, nothing happens until it’s observed, and as soon as something is observed, the observation itself is what brings it into being. So the observation and what is being observed actually arise spontaneously together.

This may all seem quite abstract. That’s why I like the image of a boat moving through water, because with that image you can see how it’s the present moment that’s creating the past, not the past that’s creating the present moment. Even though that may be hard to grasp, it’s really quite easy to have some rudimentary understanding of this by just imagining a boat going through the water and the simple recognition that it’s the present moment of the boat going through the water that creates the wake. The wake will be the past. That’s where the boat moved through the water, and that’s the signature of the boat moving through the water. But the past does not create the present.

From Adyashanti's True Spiritual Orientation, 2010

Nobody is making you feel what you are feeling. Your reactions are caused by how you interpret any situation. This is so important because it means that you ultimately become your own resource of emotional freedom and truth.

— Adyashanti

To have enough curiosity to start to question your deepest identity is absolutely vital and essential to spiritual awakening, and to the realization of peace and freedom.

Adyashanti

Any energy that you deny becomes a demon for you. It becomes your inner tormenter. And you don't get rid of your demons. You embrace them. Not indulge them, but embrace them. And if you embrace them in a way I am talking about, they no longer feel like demons. They are just energies that are available to you. They are just part of this whole spectrum of what it is to be conscious and alive and present. And everything becomes joined together back again. A mature emotional life is when all the different parts of yourself emotionally are joined back together. Nothing is put outside, nothing is denied, nothing is hidden. Nothing is unacknowledged. All brought together so that it can all come together.

The Way of Liberating Insight

Adyashanti

What we see is not the most important. Could dust rise without the invisible hand of the wind? Could a fan turn without any current? Could lungs breathe without breath? Tell me What is the shape of Love? How much does Joy weigh when held in the palm of your hand? Can you catch the Spirit of Life in a jar? All things seen depend upon the Unseen. All sounds depend upon Silence. All things felt depend upon what is not felt. ‘The Shape of Love’ by Adyashanti

The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto... Contemplate this: There is no such thing as a true belief...

~ Adyashanti

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

Adyashanti

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.

-Adyashanti

"What the universe will manifest when you are in alignment with it is a lot more interesting than what you try to manifest." Adyashanti

Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it – to deeply look into its true nature. Again, the only way to know that we’ve seen into the true nature of something is that the story we’re telling ourselves releases. It is not only seen to be illusion; it is felt to be illusion. That’s the choice you have – to be a victim to your own ideas and beliefs, or to feel into them until they drop away.

🌿 Adyashanti

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This one question “What do I know for certain?" is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions, things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.

Adyashanti

Ed van der Elsken

"When we drop the ego and all of the egoic motivations, what we are left with is acting from love. We do what we do out of love. Love for life, love for family, love for humanity. And love transcends all egoic motivations. Love is liberation in action. Adyashanti