Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If It Doesn’t Change My Whole Life?

Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.

Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from some teachers around the world.

Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.

Mallory: Thus the name, Just One Question.

Chris: We hope you enjoy.

Today, Mallory, we’re going to talk about awakening with an episode of Insights that features Adyashanti.

Mallory: Oh, Adya. I love him. Yeah, he’s published so many books with Sounds True.

Chris: Yeah, he’s great. He’s great. He’s an American-born spiritual teacher, and this episode of Insights was originally part of an online series called Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean? And you know, Tami’s last point of insight was kind of about this whole thing, right?

Mallory: The question of does awakening happen all at once, or is it a gradual thing?

Chris: Yeah, which I love, and definitely you should listen to it — after this.

Mallory: After this. Maybe not right now.

Chris: But Adya talks about this as well, and the part of the conversation we’re going to play is him addressing this idea: what if it’s not a lightning bolt? Or what if we have a moment like that, but then, you know, we’ve gotta go back to work.

Mallory: Right. I think a lot of people think that spiritual awakening has to be this big boom-bang moment.

Chris: Yeah, that—

Mallory: Maybe that’s not the case.

Chris: And then you ascend into the clouds and — no, like, you’ve gotta make breakfast and you gotta go do stuff.

Mallory: Or you record a podcast.

Chris: Or you record a podcast. Life goes on, right? And of course he says, you know, life goes on, but it did still happen. And you kind of have to do this dance with it — let it go, but also don’t forget that moment. And the way he talks about that is really beautiful. And then what I really like is he then shares one of his own moments of awakening. It was like a lightning bolt.

Mallory: Hmm.

Chris: But then it kind of keeps going, and it’s just fascinating to hear a spiritual teacher like Adya share his own journey.

Mallory: Yeah, for sure. So here is Tami Simon asking the question to Adyashanti: is it an awakening if it doesn’t change my whole life?

Chris: Stay with us.

Tami Simon: I think for a lot of people, they experience the kinds of shifts you’re talking about for moments. They might experience it while they’re listening to you or reading one of your books, but it’s not really a shift in how they live their life, or even their ongoing experience of themselves. It’s more a vacation or a trip that they take occasionally when they’re reading a book by a powerful spiritual teacher. Is that an awakening? What’s that?

Adyashanti: Sure, I think it’s an awakening. You could call it — oh, it’s a temporary awakening. Sometimes I’ll call those a foretaste, that you get a taste of something. Like you said, it’s a vacation. We’re in California — if we took a vacation to New York, and we just landed in New York, looked around for five minutes, got back in a plane, and came back here, we still would have gone to New York. We would’ve been there. We might not know really much about New York at all — we don’t know much about the terrain — but we know much more than we did before we took a flight there.

And so it’s very common for people to have these shifts that may be momentary — a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, a few weeks — that then seem to diminish, to some extent, or seem to disappear. Because they diminish doesn’t mean that what you realized was untrue. It just means that it’s still vacillating — that it wasn’t sort of deep enough or encompassing enough to become more of a stable ground from which you perceive and live. That experience is so, so common. And it does often leave a feeling of grief or disappointment in its wake.

There’s two things I often tell people, and they sound very contradictory, but I kind of tend to view them as more paradoxical. The first one is I often try to help people see that what they saw, what they experienced when everything was clear at that moment — there is still some of that with them now. It may be clouded over. It’s definitely going to be much more subtle than it was before. Sometimes it’s revelatory — it’s just put in your face, you cannot possibly miss it — but then it recedes to something that’s very soft, something that’s easy to dismiss.

So I’ll try to point them toward that, often by asking them a series of questions — something like, can you honestly tell me that everything you saw, everything you realized, that perspective, that all of it is completely gone now? And in almost every case, the person will tell me, well, it’s not all gone. It’s not like it was, though — that’s what I want. I say, well, let’s come back to how it’s presenting now. So that’s one thing I’ll do — suggest not trying to grasp that or hold onto it, but just kind of abiding with it. Just acknowledge that there’s still kind of the perfume of it, and that can be important and significant too, because what we acknowledge tends to grow in our experience — what we give a little attention to.

The other thing I’ll say, which is quite paradoxical, is: also don’t be grasping. Don’t try to recreate that experience. That was the experience of that moment — don’t become attached to it, don’t think that now that’s your reference point for your next experience of reality. It can be very difficult to let that go, because in essence you’re asking someone to let go of their experience of heaven. Even if it was temporary, it’s like — really, you’re asking me to let go of heaven?

And there’s a dynamic that’s often at play here, which is — I always think of the first awakening as a gift. It often feels like that, like it just comes out of nowhere and you feel gifted, like somehow the universe gifted you with this. And then I call it a freebie, because it doesn’t really require anything. You don’t earn it with merit, and it doesn’t come because you’ve mastered a certain technique. It can come at any point, at any time — it’s free in the sense that we don’t have to earn or deserve it.

But once that’s happened, it’s almost as if the game shifts, and what was shown to you for free now, in a certain sense, costs you everything to live with. In other words, at the moment of revelation it’s almost like the letting go is done for you automatically. And then later, it’s like — now that you’ve seen that dimension of where that letting go can get you, now you’re asked, in a way, to begin. You have to let go consciously and willingly. It’s not going to be done for you over and over and over again. It may visit you again where it’s all done for you, but now you’re being asked to almost retraverse the terrain that you nearly leapt over when this was all done for you — and now you’re doing it consciously, and of course also having to encounter your resistances, the confusions, everything you transcended. In other words, now you’re working through your humanity — what you transcended. So that’s what I mean when I say it costs you. You have to really participate. You play a very conscious role in walking back into what’s already there — as paradoxical as that may sound.

For me, there were a couple of really significant moments. I’ll describe them as briefly as I can, but try to give you all the important points. The first one happened after some years of real strident seeking — really trying to have a breakthrough, meditating hours and hours, and just really hyper-focused on it. I got to a point where I felt completely defeated. I’m sure many people listening to this have felt that at times. I remember I sat down once, and I was pushing myself so hard in meditation to cut through my thoughts and to just penetrate into something — I didn’t even know what it was. But I sat down, and it all coalesced at one moment, and I just said to myself, right as I was about to meditate, “I just can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”

At that moment, it was like a nuclear explosion went off inside of me. It was actually violent — a very violent experience, in the sense that the energy I felt was just ripping me apart. My heart was beating extremely fast. I’d been an athlete — I know what my max heart rate feels like, I was well acquainted with it — and I was way, way past that. I really felt like my heart was going to explode. So I was feeling just ripped apart by this energy, and a thought came out of nowhere, right in the midst of this chaotic, violent experience — just a thought: if this is what it’s going to take for me to be free, if I’m going to die today, if I just let go to this… I literally thought I would die physically if I let go, if I didn’t run away. And I just thought, I’ve got to find out. I’ve got to know what happens.

And somehow, something just let go. It was as simple as letting go. It wasn’t courageous — it wasn’t anything like that. I was actually willing to die at that moment, and I just let go. And like in the snap of a finger, I was in a completely different dimension. There was no body, there was no mind, there was nothing to see, nothing to feel. There was literally nothing there. There was no one there. That’s probably as far as I want to describe it, because the more I describe it, the more of an image it makes — but it was the complete absence of all that.

And yet, somehow, there was no fear. There was just a feeling of absolute freedom. Absolute freedom. And all the questions I’d struggled with, all the issues I’d had — I just felt, even though I couldn’t feel my body at all, that these insights were flooding into me, like a hundred every second, so fast that I couldn’t even register a small fraction of them consciously. They were like little lights going off, or popcorn popping. At some point it was happening so fast that I couldn’t register anything at all — it was just like something was literally being poured into me, like liquid insight, pouring in and pouring in. It went on for I don’t know how long. It was a very timeless experience.

At some point I started to come back to my bodily awareness. And surprisingly, my body was just sitting there in total calm. There was no energy left in it — no heartbeat out of control. Everything was totally fine, and in a strange sense, absolutely ordinary. After a while I was just sitting there, and I thought, okay. I got up, and I always did — I sort of bowed to a little Buddha statue I had in my meditation hut in the backyard. And as soon as I bowed, I just started laughing hysterically. It was just the most absurd thing I’d ever seen — that this Buddha figure represented, in a symbolic way, everything I had been chasing. What is this Buddha nature? What is this divinity that this symbol represents? And all of a sudden, when I bowed, I knew, without any doubt, that the thing I’d been chasing was the thing that I am — that I was what I was chasing. And it seemed like the most absurd, ridiculous joke I’d ever heard, and the joke was on me, and I didn’t mind at all. I just laughed and laughed at how ludicrous it was.

In the days and weeks after that, I wasn’t floating in any particular space — all the seeking energy was gone. I didn’t feel driven in any way. That was really nice — there was no drive, because why be pursuing what I know I am?

But something interesting happened right at the door of my meditation hut, when I was leaving. I opened the door, and right as I opened it, this — I call it the still, small voice, the place that always told me the truth — that still small voice said to me: “This isn’t all of it. Keep going.” And at that moment I felt so disappointed, because I was just hysterically laughing at the absurdity of chasing this eternity and realizing that I was eternity — and now this voice is saying, this isn’t all of it, keep going. And I kind of felt like, oh no, you can’t be serious. And then, literally within a few seconds, I realized it wasn’t discounting what I’d realized. Nothing said that what I realized wasn’t real or true. It was just telling me: there’s more to the picture. Don’t fixate here. Don’t stop here.

Chris: There’s so much more to hear with Adyashanti on that episode of Insights at the Edge titled Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean? You can find it on SoundsTrue.com or your preferred podcast platform, and we’ll put a link in the show notes. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week.

Tami Simon: The Sounds True Podcast Network.