Safransky: What method do you teach people for sustaining awakening?

Adyashanti: The first thing I say is: you don’t sustain it. The conscious effort to sustain it is the ego creeping back in. It’s really a complex process of surrender. One of the first things to let go of is the ego’s attempts to hold on to that initial experience. Trying to hold on to it — or to sustain it or stabilize it — is the best way to lose it. For many people that’s a real monkey to wrestle with: how to let go of all the layers of the psyche that are trying to grasp and reproduce and re-create the awakening.

After you understand that, I think there are many methods you could use. I don’t favor any particular one. I try to be sensitive to the person and to feel what they’re predisposed to. One method, of course, is inquiry: asking oneself, “What am I, really?” The point is not to give a pithy, spiritual answer. You’re meant to live with the question, to disassemble all your identities. The question “What am I, really?” allows you to see what you’re not: the false identities and false personas.

That’s one method. With other people, I’ll suggest that they just stop. Just be still. The most important thing is to know the person I’m talking to. What’s their concern? If you don’t know that, you can’t prescribe the right medicine. Some people come to me and say they’re not interested in discovering who they really are. And I’ll say, “Well, what are you interested in? Tell me what your passion is. What’s the most important thing in your life? Connect with that, because that is where your spiritual power is. Once you connect with that, then we can talk about how to work with it.”

The student has to find what’s really important to him or her. Then I can work with it. I think if it goes the other way — if the teacher tells the student what is supposed to be important — it doesn’t work, except by chance, when what’s important to the teacher just happens to be what is important to the student.

Saunders: I recently read an exchange with the Dalai Lama in which a woman asked him, “What is the single most important thing I can pay attention to?” He responded without hesitation, “Routine.” What do you think is the significance of routine in spiritual practice?

Adyashanti: I’ve never thought about it. To tell you the truth, I’m always trying to disrupt routine. [Laughs.] I’m always trying to unsettle the seeker in people, instead of give it something it can feel comfortable engaging in. I’m not saying that my way is right, and the other way is wrong. But what I have found is that spiritual seekers will fall into the routine of the practice, and if it happens to resonate with their deepest yearning, their deepest passion, then that’s great. But often it doesn’t. That’s why I like to connect first with a student’s passion. People will ask me, “How often should I meditate?” I’ll say, “You know what, I have no idea. What are you here for? What do you want? Can you connect with the part of you that will let you know? And then will you follow it?” Most people are so disconnected from their deepest intentions that it takes them a while to find out what they are. They’re afraid to let go of routine and find out what’s really important to them. They’re not sure they’re allowed.

Spiritual awakening doesn’t happen because you master some spiritual technique. There are lots of skillful meditators who are not awake. Awakening happens when you stop bullshitting yourself into continual nonawakening. It’s very easy to use disciplines to avoid reality rather than to encounter it. A true spirituality will have you continually facing your illusions and all the ways you avoid reality. Spiritual practice may be an important means of confronting yourself, or it may be a means of avoiding yourself; it all depends on your attitude and intention.

Saunders: Do you, personally, have a practice that you follow?

Adyashanti: No. Once awakening has really happened, and once it’s abiding, then there’s no reason to do anything to stay awake. That doesn’t mean that I don’t meditate. I meditate when I feel called to sit in stillness. But there’s no goal behind it, and it’s not a practice.

Safransky: Did you have any spiritual or religious experiences or inclinations when you were young?

Adyashanti: Sure, I had lots of religious inclinations. My favorite movies were always those big biblical epics, like The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston. I was just mesmerized by religion from a young age. My parents didn’t go to church, but some of my relatives were very religious, and there was a lot of religious talk and debate in the family.

From the time I was a little kid, I had what I guess you could call “spiritual experiences.” They were common for me, and I didn’t think anything of them. I’d “merge” with my dresser drawer, or I’d see a white light at the end of my bed and think, Oh, OK. That was there last night and a week ago. It made me feel good and was comforting, but I didn’t put it into a spiritual context. It was all just normal.

Throughout my teens, I would have days when I’d wake up, and it was as if something totally different were looking through my eyes. I could sense, and feel in a visceral way, that everything was one, that everything I was looking at was somehow myself. I learned pretty quickly that I had to be careful when I was having one of those days, because I would tend to look at people really closely and kind of freak them out.

Then, when I was nineteen, I read a book — I think it might have been by Alan Watts — and I came across the word enlightenment. I had no idea what it was, but something clicked inside me. I absolutely had to know more about it. At that instant, I felt this sense that my life was no longer mine. I didn’t know exactly what had happened, but I knew that some force had woken up inside me, and I just knew the life I’d thought I would have wasn’t going to be my life at all. The knowledge was thrilling, but also frightening.

The funny thing is, as soon as I thought, I have to know what enlightenment is, I stopped having any of those spiritual experiences. They just totally disappeared for about five years. I sought enlightenment the way most people do: I went out and found a Zen teacher and started meditating. It never even occurred to me that I might already have experienced something close to it. Only later did I realize I was having “foretastes” all along the way.

It took about five years of practice to wear down the seeker in me. I strove so hard that I was completely at the end of my rope. For five years I pushed myself until I literally thought I was going to have a major psychological breakdown. I would wake up thinking, Is this the day I end up in a mental ward? One day I went into my little meditation hut in the backyard, and I said to myself, I’m going to break through. Right here. Right now. I put all of my will into it, and within ten seconds it just imploded on me. I said, “I can’t do this.” The knowledge was from my gut. “I can’t do this.” It was like when someone punches you in the stomach and all the air goes out. I was totally deflated. That’s why I often tell people my practice was the practice of failure. I failed. I didn’t progress to a higher state. I beat my head against the wall until I failed. And even then I didn’t give up. I couldn’t be that noble.

Right after I said to myself, “I can’t do this,” everything opened up. I had an awakening of a sort, complete with a lot of the usual spiritual accouterments. A powerful kundalini energy besieged my body. My heart was beating so fast I thought it was going to explode. I thought I was going to die. In fact, I was sure I was going to die. I thought, Well, if this is what it takes to find out, then I’m willing. I’m ready to go. There was nothing courageous or macho about the thought. In fact, I was  surprised that I would actually sacrifice my life in this totally irrational pursuit of something that I didn’t even know much about. As soon as I thought, OK, I’ll die, everything stopped. The energy stopped. I stopped. There was just space. That’s all there was at that moment. I guess you could say I’d disappeared. And then I had this sensation like information was being downloaded into me. You know how you’ll get an insight like Aha! I was having a hundred ahas a second, so many I had no idea what I was aha-ing about. So I sat there until it was done downloading. I couldn’t even tell you to this day what was being downloaded. Then I got up. There just seemed to be no reason to sit there anymore. I got up and bowed to my little Buddha figure, and I burst out laughing. I thought, You son of a bitch. I’ve been chasing you for five years, and you are the exact same thing that I am. It was hilarious to me.

That was the beginning. I was a twenty-five-year-old kid with absolutely no fear. That led to a rather interesting next five years.

Safransky: I’ve heard you say that you were quite reckless after that.

Adyashanti: I was. I didn’t go around thinking, I’m going to do this because I can’t be harmed. It was just a twenty-five-year-old personality with no fear, finding out about life. It’s hard to explain what that feels like. I got myself into situations and relationships that, looking back, I see were a product of my remaining attachments to various identities, combined with an absolute lack of fear, because I knew that death is a myth. Bodies drop, and personalities drop, and your brain no longer functions, but you don’t drop. Death is just an experience that reality has, just as birth is an experience reality has. We’ve assigned death a certain finality, because everything we’ve identified with and everyone we’ve become attached to does die. We become attached to experience, and experience passes. As the Buddha said, it’s impermanent. But I had come upon something that does not pass. It doesn’t die, and it’s not born. It’s not really living. It’s of a whole other domain.

So life became my practice, and mistakes became my teacher. And once again I experienced failure after failure. It was humbling, even humiliating. I put myself in situations where my self-image would get crushed. Looking back I could easily say, “Boy, I made a lot of dumb mistakes.” But I needed to do it that way. I wasn’t going to let go of those identities on the meditation cushion. It would have been nice if it could have been contained in this safe environment — bowing and meditating and meeting with the teacher — but it often doesn’t work that way. Spirituality is much more of a bloody mess than we like to admit.

So I bumbled around and made a lot of mistakes, and my many identities got stripped away unceremoniously and sometimes in public, which was even more valuable. The most glaring example was when I got into an unhealthy relationship. It was just one of those relationships where I thought I could help this person, who appeared to need a lot of help. It was very dysfunctional, and it drew on every helper identity I had, every I-can’t-help identity, every fear I had of what somebody might do to themselves because I couldn’t help them. After a year and a half, I started to see that it was going down a dark hole, and I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, only more darkness.

To end a relationship, most people just get angry and say hurtful things to each other. We often use negative emotions in order to separate from people. But I couldn’t do that. I think I had seen too much spiritually. Anger just wouldn’t work for me. I couldn’t get a sense of blame going. I realized the only way I could extract myself was to start to pay attention to what I knew was true and to act on it, no matter what. Bit by bit, I started to do that. Of course, to do that, I had to get outside my personas, my personalities, my self-images. I had to get outside all of that and just act on truth alone, no matter what it looked like, no matter the reactions I got. That’s what I started to do. When the relationship ended, I felt completely stripped of any self-image, as if it had all been torn away and cast on the ground. I didn’t know who I was anymore, because I could no longer pretend to be anybody; I knew any persona I tried on wouldn’t be true. I saw the phoniness of it, not in a spiritual way, but in a human, visceral way. It was an amazing relief.

That whole situation was an intense, quick purification. Maybe I could have done it on the cushion, but I’ll bet it would have taken twenty or thirty years. I got on the spiritual fast track, and the fast track isn’t always pretty. Fortunately my mistakes didn’t do any permanent damage to me or anybody else. That was really lucky.

Safransky: Then what happened?

Adyashanti: One day, when I was thirty-three, something happened without any emotion, which, for me, was absolutely necessary: I heard the call of a bird outside, and a thought came up from my gut, not from my head: Who hears this sound? The next thing I knew, I was the bird, and I was the sound, and I was the person listening; I was everything. I thought, I’ll be damned. I had tasted this at twenty-five, but there had been so much energy and spiritual byproduct. This time I didn’t get elated. It was just factual. I got up and went into the kitchen to see if I was the stove, too. Yeah, I was the stove. Looking for something more mundane, I went into the bathroom. What do you know: I was the toilet, too. Paradoxically I also realized that I am nothing, less than nothing. I am what is before nothingness. And in the next moment even that disappeared. The “I” disappeared completely. All of this — the oneness, the nothingness, and beyond both oneness and nothingness — was realized in quick succession. It all exists simultaneously.  

This was a sort of pure, unemotional, clear perception of reality that got more and more ordinary over time. After a while, you realize that everything is one, and you stop jumping up and down about it. It becomes a part of everyday life. At this point, there’s nothing spiritual about it to me. In fact, it sort of took away my “spiritual” life, which is sometimes necessary to have, but is sort of an imposition, an addition onto life. I think if spirituality, that imposed structure, works well, it eventually disappears.

Safransky: Somehow it’s easier to imagine someone who’s awake or enlightened experiencing states of joy or bliss, rather than states of depression, anger, and confusion. What is the ordinary range of emotion for you, and how does it differ from what you experienced before these awakenings?

Adyashanti: No emotion or experience is necessarily excluded from my life. Do I ever get angry? Sure, I get angry. Awakening shows us that emotions are illusions — but that doesn’t mean they will cease to arise. That doesn’t mean we’ll never have another conflicting thought. I find that the awakened consciousness has an innate tendency to look into anything that feels discordant: the more awake I became, the more sensitive I became to any discord in the psyche or in the body. Spirit actually seems to be interested in discord. Since there’s nothing to be lost, there’s no fear you’ll be seen or found out.

Enlightenment has nothing to do with the elimination of certain human experiences. The difference for me is that there is this deep, underlying sense of well-being and freedom, a lack of self-consciousness. The mind that’s always measuring, How am I doing? Do they like me? — that receded. For a while, its absence was baffling. Even after the event that started with hearing the bird, much more conditioning had to be cleared out, a tremendous amount. There were years of uncovering anything that remained.

Saunders: So there is still transformational work to be done after awakening, in order to become fully enlightened.

Adyashanti: I wouldn’t call it “transformational work.” It’s just paying attention to what is. There’s no time when you’re so awake that you get to stop paying attention and go back to sleep again. I’m still capable of having a thought that’s untrue move through my mind and emotionally grab me for a second. Seeing that these thoughts aren’t true is a continual process. You can’t just understand it with your mind, though. You’ve got to see it from your whole being. And it seems that, the more you see through these thoughts, the less often they visit, and the more you can actually express reality through your actions, through your relationships, and through who you are as a human being. I guess one could call that “transformational work,” but when there’s real awakening, it doesn’t feel like work.

Once you see reality, once you know it, you know the whole of it. In that sense, there’s no deepening. But, at the same time, reality is like a bud that keeps opening. The petals keep revealing themselves. It’s not as if that bud becomes something that it wasn’t before. It just keeps showing its potential. Reality reveals itself more and more over time. I can’t see a limit to that, since we’re talking about something that’s inherently without limit. Who knows, though. I’m always open to being surprised. [Laughs.]

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