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Nondual Highlights Issue #1875 Saturday, July 31, 2004 Editor: Mark

 

- image by Robert O'Hearn, on AdyashantiSatsang

One has come to the absolute fact - not relative fact - the absolute fact that there is no psychological security in anything that man has invented; one sees that all our religions are inventions, put together by thought. When one sees that all our divisive endeavours, which come about when there are beliefs, dogmas, rituals, which are the whole substance of religion, when one sees all that very clearly, not as an idea, but as a fact, then that very fact reveals the extraordinary quality of intelligence in which there is complete, whole security.

J. Krishnamurti from The Wholeness of Life

Interview: The Taboo of Enlightenment
Stephen Bodian

One of the most popular Buddhist teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area these days is not a Tibetan lama or a traditional Zen master but an unconventional, American-born lay teacher named Adyashanti. His public talks and dialogues (which he calls satsangs a term borrowed from India’s Advaita, or "nondual," tradition) attract hundreds of seekers, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike.

Although Adyashanti rarely talks about Zen or Buddhism these days, he did train closely with a Buddhist teacher, spending more than a dozen years practicing meditation under the guidance of Arvis Justi, a lay teacher in the lineage of Zen master Taizan Maezumi, the founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. At age twenty-five, while sitting alone on his cushion, Gray had a classic kensho, or awakening experience, in which - as he describes it now - he "penetrated to the emptiness of all things and realized that the Buddha I had been chasing was what I was." As powerful as this experience had been, however, Gray knew immediately that he had seen just the tip of the iceberg. "I had discovered that I am what I’ve been seeking," he explains. "Then the next koan arose spontaneously: What is this that I am?"

Although Gray continued to meditate, absorbed by this new question, he reports that all sense of effort and anxiety disappeared. During this period, he married and went to work in his father’s machine shop. "I was happy," he recalls, "but I knew it wasn’t enough." As his inquiry deepened, his practice diverged from the traditional format, and he lost interest in doing retreats or relying on his teachers for guidance. Instead, his energies turned inward and became, in his words, "exclusively focused on realizing the truth of my own being." In addition to meditating, he spent many hours sitting in coffee shops writing out answers to the questions, or life koans, that spontaneously came to him.

Finally, at thirty-one, Gray had an experience of awakening that immediately put to rest all his questions and doubts. Two years later Arvis Justi asked him to teach, and he changed his name to Adyashanti, Sanskrit for "primordial peace."

I interviewed Adyashanti - a teacher of mine for several years - at his home in San Jose on a warm Indian-summer afternoon. He’s a small man, slight of build, with blond hair cropped close like a monk’s. Our conversation was grounded in our familiarity, as friends and as teacher and student, and we laughed frequently as we talked. - Stephan Bodian

What’s the relationship, do you suppose, between all those years of sitting zazen and this kensho experience? Did they prime the pump of awakening? Were they steps leading to awakening? You now seem to be dismissing the concept of "stages of the path," yet there appears to be some causal relationship between your Zen meditation practice and your awakening. I’m deeply grateful for my Zen practice. It ultimately led me to fail well. I failed at being a Buddhist, I failed at being a perfect exemplar of the ten precepts, and certainly I failed at meditation, failed at all my efforts to bust down the "gateless gate" to awakening that Zen speaks of. And the fact that I actually got to the point where I failed - and I failed completely - was useful. Zen provided a place for me to fail, and I needed that. In fact, I’d say my process wasn’t so much a letting go as an utter failure. Zen did a good job of letting me fall on my face.

What would have been a success - awakening? Well, failure was the success - awakening happened through failure. In that sense I have a great respect for the lineage. What was transmitted was bigger than all the carriers, it was even bigger than the lineage, much bigger than Zen, much bigger than Buddhism.

What was that? I’d say a certain spark, an aliveness.

How has your own enlightenment changed the way you function in the world: your relationships, your family life, your everyday behavior? Does being enlightened mean that you never get angry or reactive or make big mistakes? There’s no such thing as never getting angry. Enlightenment can and does use all the available emotions. Otherwise, we would have to discount Jesus for getting pissed off in the temple and kicking over the table. The idea that enlightenment means sitting around with a beatific smile on our faces is just an illusion.

At a human level, enlightenment means that you are no longer divided within yourself, and that you no longer experience a division between yourself and others. Without any inner division, you stop experiencing most of the usual forms of reactivity.

Could you say a little more what you mean by no "inner division"? Most human beings spend their lives battling with opposing inner forces: what they think they should do versus what they are doing; how they feel about themselves versus how they are; whether they think they’re right and worthy or wrong and unworthy. The separate self is just the conglomeration of these opposing forces. When the self drops away, inner division drops away with it.

Now, I can’t say that I never make a mistake, because in this human world being enlightened doesn’t mean we become experts at everything. What does happen, though, is that personal motivations disappear. Only when enlightenment occurs do we realize that virtually everything we did, from getting out of bed to going to work to being in a relationship to pursuing our pleasures and interests, was motivated by personal concern. In the absence of a separate self, there’s no personal motivation to do anything. Life just moves us.

When personal motivation no longer drives us, then what’s left is our true nature, which naturally expresses itself on the human dimension as love or compassion. Not a compassion that we cultivate or practice because we’re supposed to, but a compassion that arises spontaneously from our undivided state. If we undertake being a good, compassionate person as a personal identity, it just gets in the way of awakening.

In traditional Buddhism, at least as I practiced it, there’s a taboo against talking openly about enlightenment, as we’re doing now. It seems to be based on the fear that the ego will co-opt the experience and become inflated. In your dharma talks you speak in great detail about awakening, including your own, and in your public dialogues you encourage others to do the same. Why is that? When I was sitting with my teacher, Arvis, we’d all go into the kitchen after the meditation and dharma talk and have some fruit and tea, and we’d talk openly about our lives. For the most part we didn’t focus on our spiritual experiences, but they were a part of the mix. Then these same people would do retreats at the Zen Center of Los Angeles and have big awakenings, and the folks in L.A. began to wonder what was happening in this little old lady’s living room up north. Arvis’s view was simple: The only thing I’m doing that they’re not, she said, is that we sit around casually and talk, and what’s happening on the inside for people isn’t kept secret or hidden. This way, people get beyond the sense that they’re the only ones who are having this or that experience. They come out of their shell, which actually makes them more available to a deeper spiritual process.

The tradition of talking about certain experiences only in private with your teacher keeps enlightenment a secret activity reserved for special people. I can understand the drawbacks of being more open, of course. Some people may blab on about how enlightened they are, and become more egotistical. But when everything remains open to inquiry, then even the ego’s tendency to claim enlightenment for itself becomes obvious in the penetrating light of public discourse. In the long run, both ways have their strengths and weaknesses, but I’ve found that having students ask their questions in public breaks down the isolation that many spiritual people feel - the sense that nobody else could possibly understand what they’re going through, or that they’re so rotten at their practice, or that nobody could be struggling like they are. And when people have breakthroughs and talk about them in public, awakening loses its mystique. Everyone else can see that it’s not just special people who have deep awakenings, it’s their neighbor or their best friend.

Would you claim that you are enlightened? Well, no, not with a straight face. I would say enlightenment is enlightened and awakeness is awake. It’s not an experience; it’s a fact.

To read more of this interview, please see the Fall 2004 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

http://www.tricycle.com/new.php?p=articles&id=254