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#2742 -
Nondual
Highlights
ADYASHANTI –
from Initial Awakening
Conversation with
Tom (Tape 5a 49:29-b)
Tom: Hi!
Adya: Welcome
Tom
Tom: Good to see
you again. I want to go back to this Ultimate Reality or
Truth.
Adya: Oh,
good
Tom: Cause I
guess I'm getting it piece by piece. I'm one of these
really
slow guys. I mean so slow I may never get it. So, from what
you're saying it
sounds like "gap" or the "gateless gate" or
whatever is in fact this
Presence. And my question is: 'is that it?' I mean is that the
end of the
story, basically and that it all unfolds from that or is there
more to it --or
is that it?
Adya: That's it!
For you right now that's it. What's 'it' is to realize that you
are that simple awake Presence. That's the fundamental
realization. Of
course you can explain it and the mind will go, okay I can buy
that, I'll
understand it. It's not that, it's the realization, it's the
fundamental flash
of recognition: "Oh I'm not Tom! That's not what I am. Tom
happening.
There's nothing wrong with Tom. It's not what I am. Tom is
infused, being
lived by this Presence, Consciousness, whatever you want to call
it. That's
the fundamental realization. That is the fundamental
realization.
Tom: Okay but
there's more beyond that I take it.
Adya: Like
what?
Tom: It seems
from the way you talk about it that there's kind of a
Adya: there's a
process of sort of embodying it as a human being through
the persona
Tom: but there 's
also kind of unfolding of this larger truth of like you
said
yesterday, the many perspectives on any given issue or …
Adya: those
perspectives have nothing to do with Truth. Those are not
important. They're just perspectives.
Tom: Yeah
but..
Adya: It's a
total non-attachment to them.
Tom: Right.
Adya: An
effortless non-attachment to particular perspectives. The
only
thing we attach to is because we have identity wrapped up in it.
That's why
we attach.
Tom: Right.
Adya: That's the
only reason we attach. That's why we attach to ideas
because we have identity wrapped up in them. We attach to
memories
'cause we have identity wrapped up in them, attach to personas
because we
have identity wrapped up in them. I don't want to get to much
into "what's
more" because then the mind just goes into the future.
That's irrelevant.
Right.
Gap here,
next tape:
Adya: The birds
outside; that's the presence, these flowers next to us;
that's the presence, the microphone in your hand; that's the
presence. You
want to find God, it's in your hand. You want to go to heaven,
you're sitting
in heaven. There's the fundamental realization. We're always
going
somewhere else. Have you ever noticed? Heaven is somewhere.
Somewhere
other than here. Somewhere other than Now, in some situation
that's
better, that's more halo-enshrouded, more whatever. This is it!
Your stinky
socks. That's God. You want to worship something worthwhile? Take
them
off. Put them on your altar, light incense. You know I want to
see a clear
manifestation of the Divine. Unadulterated. Undistorted. It's
your sock.
Take a good sniff. I know it sounds funny but I am also being
serious. We
keep dividing the world up. The fundamental realization is that
everything is
That. And in our most fundamental sense the nature of Everything
is
Nothing. Everything is an emanation and expression of the
Nothingness that
we are.
Tom: This whole
idea or sense of presence is the first time I have kind of
connected with what you have been talking about.
Adya: That’s
the doorway. You open to the felt sense of Presence. Yes.
Tom: It's a
little 'p' now, it's not a big 'P' …
Adya: Don't ask
for the big one. You pay attention to what's given. Right?
There's a sense of presence, oh it's given. Put your mind there.
As
Nisargardatta used to say 'affectionate attention',
'affectionate
awareness.' Putting your 'Oh, the Presence' and the willingness
to feel, to
open to it, to sense of it, giving yourself to it. This can
become the doorway,
the invitation. If our mind says 'well, you know it's just like a
little sense of
felt Presence, and you know, I want the big explosion or I want
the
Oneness thing or I want to realize that I am the bird or the
Chevy outside’
….. I'm not there yet. Then we actually start to dismiss
what's being given in
the moment.
Tom: The
denial.
Adya: The denial.
And you see the smallest thing contains everything.
Everything. The smallest thing contains everything. So you give
your
attention to this one small thing and it reveals everything. So
if that
resonates for you, you can get Ah! --that felt sense of presence,
right, an
inner sense of presence, inner sense of silence. That's what to
put
attention on, cause then at least your spirituality is not an
intellectual
pursuit at that point.
Tom: Right that's
my major problem.
Adya: So presence
is going to be a great invitation for you.
Tom: So the main
topic of this whole retreat has been how to make it a
priority, we have to devote ourselves in some way to this quest.
I don't
know whatever you want to call it but you haven't talked much
about that.
I wondered if…
Adya: Primarily
because either you got it or you don't. You can't bake up any
phony intention in this game. Either you actually want the truth
or you
actually want the awakening of truth, you actually want the truth
more
than you want anything else. You want the truth more than you
want to feel
good. The truth feels good but you can't get there if you want to
feel good
more than you want the truth. You want the Truth no matter what.
Of
course, it is there in everybody, and everybody is the truth.
It's a matter
of connecting with that point in yourself. It's not an anxious
thing. "I want
the Truth and I'm just about to explode, I want it so bad."
That's a surface
thing. What I am talking about is something that's very deep,
very vast, very
broad. Actually, it's quiet.
Tom: The word
intention I think captures it for me.
Adya: There's the
intention of the Truth, of my Being.
Tom: So out of
that will flow whatever needs to be done, I take it. I mean
you spent 15 years of pretty hard work, it sounds like. Most of
the people I
hear about that have
Adya: Pretty
much
Tom: achieved
something have done that. And yet you talk about it can
happen in a moment.
Adya: It does
happen, it can happen ..
Tom: But it seems
like to me there is something I need to do.
Adya: That's the
fundamental illusion. I thought that too. If you want to
play out that fundamental illusion for 15 years like I did, have
at it. Go at it.
Maybe you'll burn out.
Tom: I've been
doing it for ten years.
Adya: Well hell,
that's long enough. That's the fundamental illusion. Right?
That I have to do something, that I have to do something to
get
somewhere. It just simply ain't true. It's not, not, not, not,
true. If it
takes you 30 years to get yourself to the point where you are
willing to
consider a different possibility then okay. Maybe it took you or
maybe it
took a lot of people 30 years of hard spiritual labor to go
"hey, I don't
have to hang out in the is prison forever." The door has
always been open. I
just thought I had to earn myself a ticket out of here. But
there's not
ticket and there's no gatekeeper. Boy, do I feel dumb now.
Tom: You look at
Buddhism and all this history and you see that they talk
about lifetimes to achieve what you're talking about. Adya: Yeah,
they are
full of crap.
Tom: Okay.
Adya: I tell you
-unenlightened people talk about lifetimes, enlightened
people do not. Period. Tradition I came from, they don't talk
about
lifetimes. You go to Zen …. You meet a real Zen master who’s
awake ... any
of them in history, any of them in history that have been awake
…. you will
not hear them talking about lifetimes. It's always wake up right
here, right
now, this life. This is it. Right here, right now. That's the
essence of it.
Right here, right now. No lifetimes.
Tom: So those
folks that are talking about lifetimes are the ones that
aren't there.
Adya: They're
propagating a tradition, which is fine. It's just
completely
irrelevant. It is the denial of Truth right now. I'm not saying
someone can't
wake up through that kind of tradition. The problem is when they
wake up
they actually turn around and think it's the tradition that got
them there
and so they keep propagating the same nonsense. You see what I
mean? If I
fell off a barstool, hit my head on the ground and I suddenly
woke up and
became enlightened, I might have a propensity to have all my
students
gather in bars and lob themselves off of stools. A rather
ridiculous
endeavor, wouldn't you think? It would be insane, wouldn't
it?
Tom: Yeah.
Adya: And yet
guess what happens? I was in this tradition and I was
believing in lifetimes da-a-da-a-da and somehow through all that
morass of
complications I luckily, through grace, woke-up. And the tendency
of this
mind is to say "I woke up because of all that." But if
you examine it, there
is no causal relationship. You cannot make a direct cause-effect
relationship.
It just can't be done. You see?
Tom: Yeah.
Adya: Just think
about it, I mean look at it with clear eyes, your own
intelligence, your own innate intelligence. Look at the
traditions, if they are
in the business of pumping out enlightened beings, if that's what
it's really
all about: "We are here to help you become enlightened,
welcome into our
doors” … right? And you as a good consumer advocate you
come and say
“wonderful”. Okay, how many out of every thousand
people that walk into
your door and join your tradition and go through the process, how
many
enlightened beings do you pump out? And most places they are
going to
start going, "Um, ah”, clearing throat, “um, would
you like some tea?" Right?
Maybe one. That's not good for advertising, is it?
Tom: No, it's
not.
Adya: What is
good for advertising is, "it's a long term thing, it's
many
lifetimes, folks, everybody dedicate themselves but don't think
that it's
actually going to work in this lifetime. Come on, get over it,
just join in” ….
Tom: Very
interesting.
Adya: I am just
suggesting that we use a little consumer advocacy here.
What works and what doesn't work. Right? And if we are going to
look at
things with clear eyes it's like a scientific method, either I
want to see
what's true or I don't. And a lot of untruths have been around
for 2000
years, haven't they? Science knows that. Most of science, there
was things,
the world was flat — how long was that around before we
discovered it
wasn't? But there were a lot of wise people that thought it was
flat,
weren't there? Really wise people. And we find out it's not. And
yet, for
some immense taboo that surrounds spirituality, that we don't
think we can
actually look and just go … does this stuff work? What works
and what
doesn't? It's not all nonsense by any means. There's some good
stuff in it.
There's some
great stuff in it. Unbelievably good stuff. But there is as
much crap as there is good stuff. There is as much culture as
there is truth.
There's as much baggage … so if we start to see through
this. Wait a
minute, what's true, what's not, what's useful, what's not, what
confuses,
what's not, what causes people to delay, what causes them not to
delay,
what causes them to go into a trance, what doesn't? Anyway, you
don't
want to get me going on this. I encourage people to do what a lot
of the
people who really woke up do. The same people we intend to
regard
(highly), like the Buddha for example. The Buddha, he visited the
traditions,
right? He was very much a Hindu and went through the whole thing,
and
after he went through the whole thing, a lot of teachers, a lot
of
teachings, he said, "You know, I'm not enlightened! Hasn't
happened. I am
going to sit down. I am going to figure this out for myself.”
{sound of a train
whistle going by}
Thank you Buddha.
. It's this essential sense of pulling energy back from all
the ways we put it, not so we come into an arrogant place where
we think I
know everything, but we pull energy back and we really look.
‘cause you
see, everything I have talked about, can you see how it keeps
attention out
there? Life-times, and this and that and the other. And this is
about you and
me, isn't it? It's about you, it's about me. It's about,
"What am I?" It's
not about how many damn prostrations I can do. It's about who the
hell is
doing them. It's not about how many hours I can sit twisted up.
It's about
"Who's sitting here and why?” It's not about, "I'm
seeking enlightenment",
it's you don't even know who you are. Why seek enlightenment when
you
don't even know who you are that's seeking it. It's this sort of
reality
check-in. It's this "Oh" the sobering up. This is about
me. This is about the
truth about me. It's always been about the truth about me. Can
you feel
this sort of energy that keeps going out? It starts to come back.
What am
I, right here, right now. this instant.
Tom: Pretty
basic.
Adya: You get it?
Pretty basic, huh?
Tom: Pretty
simple, pretty basic, actually.
Adya: Very, very,
very basic. Through the traditions there's beautiful things,
even through the complicated ones. Through Tibetan Buddhism,
you've got
Dzog-chen. Beautiful pointing-out instructions. Through Zen, of
course,
you've got the questions, "Who am I? What's the face before
your parents
were born?" … that kind of stuff. In the tradition of
Ramana you've got a
very direct, "Who am I?” These are totally direct.
Spirituality distilled down
to its least acceptable form. Right? Because it serves no other
agenda
besides awakening. And yet you pick it up and you've got
something atomic
in your hands. Because it is distilled down to what it's all
about. And you
look into yourself and you see a thought is a thought and a
feeling is a
feeling and an experience is an experience and there is something
that's
before thought, there is something that sees thoughts. There is
something
that notices experience or is experiencing experience. There is
something
that is the ultimate perceiver of all perceptions. There is this
sort of
natural moving back into, right, you get back there and this,
whatever this
is, there becomes a sense of presence as you get closer into the
core of
this that's perceiving, this that is awake. It's sort of like
getting close to
the sun. It emanates a warmth. It emanates a presence. That's
why
presence is talked about. And you just sort of are drawn in. You
want to go
to the sun, you don't move away from the warmth, you move towards
it.
You'll run into the sun. The presence is like the emanation from
truth, from
our own emptiness and it draws you in. There is no theory about
it, is there?
There is no "ism" to it. There is nothing to believe.
There is nothing to not
believe. At that moment you are as far away from all the
structures of
thought, religious, philosophical and otherwise as you could ever
be, and you
are finally alone with yourself. And only then can this I reveal
itself. It’s
not who I can become, you see. That's why lives don't mean
anything. Many
lives. It's what I am, this life, the next life, the last 400
lives. What I am
now, what I have always been. Not what I can become. I do not
become
enlightened. That's a myth. It's what am I now, what I was then,
not what
will I be anytime in the future.
Tom: Once you
have that sense, you are all those lives, you are all the
past
lives.
Adya: That's
right. You realize this, that's awake, this is what has
been
informing all of them. It was always there. Right? It was always
there.
Tom: Right.
Adya: That's the
marvelously illuminating Buddha Mind, as Bankei used to
say. Already here.
Tom: Good. Thank
you.
Adya: Thanks for
letting me rant. And having said that, I also quite
paradoxically have a great, great respect and a real soft spot in
my heart,
believe it or not, given the way I talk about it, but a real soft
spot for the
tradition that I came from. I have a very soft spot for many
traditions
because they're part of the process for a lot of people too. It's
like
everything else that we also have to be willing to see the
totality of them.
So even though I have a tremendous gratitude for my tradition,
my
gratitude did not stop me from seeing what I thought was useful
and what I
thought was useless. But there's a tremendous gratitude for them.
Actually
for all of them. Almost everyone in this room has come through
one of them
in some way or another or at some time or another.
And so, in that
sense, they all serve, if only to get us finally Nowhere. Right.
Then they have served. I like to say Zen was a great place,
it allowed me
to fail. I needed to fail, so I did.
(19:50)
Thanks to Mark
Scorelle and Helga of Wisdom-l
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wisdom-l/