The Awakened Way...What is it like to live an awakened life?
While the world is trying to solve its problems and everyone around
you is engaged in the same, you're not. While everybody around you is
trying to figure it out, trying to arrive, trying to "get there,"
trying to be worthy, you're not. While everyone thinks that awakening
is a grand, noble, halo-enshrouded thing, for you it's not. While
everybody is running from this life right now, in this moment, to try
to get there, you're not. Where everybody has an argument with
somebody else, mostly everybody else, starting with themselves, you
don't. Where everybody is so sure that happiness will come when
something is different than it is now, you know that it won't. When
everybody else is looking to achieve the perfect state and hold on to
it, you're not.
When everybody around you has a whole host of ideas and beliefs about
a whole variety of things, you don't. Everyone on the path is getting
there; you haven't gotten anywhere. Everyone is climbing the mountain;
you're selling hiking boots and picks at the foot in the hope that if
they climb it and come back down, they may be too exhausted to do it
again. When everybody else is looking to the next book, to the next
teacher, to the next guru to be told what's real, to be given the
secret key to an awakened life, you're not. You don't have a key
because there's not a lock to put it in.
When you're living what you are in an awakened way, being simply what
you've always been, you're actually very simple. You basically sit
around wondering what all the fuss is about. When everyone is sitting
around saying, "I hope that happens to me," you remember when you did
that. You remember that you didn't find a solution to that. You
remember that the whole idea that there was a problem created all of
that. When you're being what you are, when you're living the awakened
life, there's nobody to forgive, because there's no resentment held,
no matter what.
The truth of your being doesn't crave happiness; it could actually
care less. It doesn't crave love, not because you are so full of love,
but because it just doesn't crave love. It's very simple. It doesn't
seek to be known, regarded highly, or understood. When you're living
what you are in an awakened way, there's no ideal for you anymore.
You've stepped off the entire cycle of suffering, of becoming; you're
not interested.
It's a curious life you find yourself in. You find yourself… where you
are. Not where I am, where you are. Where you really are. Where we
really are. It's a curious place to be (especially in the beginning)
not to be driven by anything—pleasure or displeasure, helping or
hurting, loving or hating. The only thing that will move you (and I
don't mean to be too poetic about this) is the same thing that moves a
leaf hanging from a tree. It's simply because the breeze blows that
way. So you always know what to do: The breeze blows that way, and
that's the way you go. You don't ask questions anymore. You don't
evaluate why the breeze is blowing that way because you know that you
don't know why. And you know you can't know why. There's never been a
leaf anywhere that knows why the wind blows that way on that day at
that moment. That breeze changes the orientation of your life, moment
to moment to moment, simply because that's the way life's moving. And
when you're living in your awakened self you have no argument with the
way it's moving because it is the same as you are.
And you know that the breeze was always there, from the very
beginning, and that it wasn't reserved for special people. If you
didn't notice it at some point in your life, you know it was because
you weren't listening, or because you thought you had to figure
something out before you could listen, or because you thought there
had to be some conclusion before you could just listen so deeply, so
without agenda, so without hope of a better future that you would feel
the movement.
Many of you know what I'm speaking of. Truth never explains why it's
moving that way at that moment. And if you ask, it won't give any
information. It would be like a leaf asking the wind, "Why are you
moving that way right now?" The question doesn't make any sense to the
wind.
But your argument with the way the truth would move—whatever that way
is—is no longer there for you. You're no longer arguing with it.
You're no longer trying to figure it out. Mother Mary didn't figure it
out. Buddha didn't figure it out. Ramana didn't figure it out. None of
them figured it out. They just became That. Simple. Ordinary—in the
same way a leaf is ordinary.
When you're living in your awakened being and living in an awakened
way, power on any level is not an issue for you. It's not interesting.
The power to control another human being is not interesting.
Intellectual power is not interesting. The power to control yourself
is not interesting. The power that people want to give you is not
interesting to you—not because it shouldn't be; it's just not. What
would you want to do with it? You see that there's nothing you want to
do with it. You realize, in the truth of your being, that you are the
totality itself, but you have no interest whatsoever in doing anything
with that knowledge, with using that knowledge.
Finally, you realize that you really don't want to change anybody, not
because you shouldn't want to change them, because you just don't. You
might not want to be around everyone, but still you don't want to
change them. None of this is an ideal—it's the end of ideals. None of
this is holiness; it's the end of holiness. It's the beginning of
wholeness. None of this is something to achieve, because it's not
achievable. It's simply what is in the truth of your being. It's just
what is. You can't attain what's naturally so. And nobody anywhere can
ever tell you when or why, or to what degree you'll let go of untruth;
you will let go when you let go, usually when nothing else works.
When you're living in the awakened way, in the awakened being that you
are, you're alone, and you're finally comfortable with it. You're
alone, but you're not lonely at all, because the only one who was ever
supposed to meet you where you are—the only one who ever could meet
you where you are one hundred percent—was you. Nobody else could ever
fully meet you where you are—maybe ninety percent, maybe ninety-five.
Nobody can meet you fully but you. When you finally do, then you don't
need anybody else to do it for you. Then you're alone, more alone than
you could ever imagine. And strangely—very strangely—you are more
connected, more intimate, more at one with everything. More. And you
would have never thought that those two could in any way be together:
total aloneness and total oneness. You would have never guessed that
that's the way it would end up. But it does, and it always has.
And finally, when you're just living in the awakened way that you
really are, you'll never form an image again of what it's like. Even
as it's happening, you won't form an image because you'll know they're
all images, dust. The way it was yesterday won't be the way it is
today.
Adyashanti. Awakened Living Intensive. Berkeley, CA.
http://www.adyashanti.org/