Safransky: You said earlier that the awakened state is not a reprieve from grief or anger or any human experience. So how are negative emotions to be handled?

Adyashanti: In my case, grief and anger and other negative emotions don’t happen anywhere nearly as often as they used to. But I’ve found that the truth of who we are can and does use all the emotions. Anger is an energy that can be used in a wise way. Mostly we experience anger out of divisiveness, a battle between two opposing forces. But one can experience anger that comes from wholeness rather than division. Once you’ve experienced it, you know the difference. We don’t need that energy very often, but when it’s needed, it will come.

Safransky: How about violence?

Adyashanti: I haven’t experienced violence as a spontaneous manifestation. To me, violence is inherently self-centered. The first Buddhist precept is “Do not kill.” But then there’s the ethical conundrum: What would you do if you had the opportunity to kill Hitler before the Holocaust? If you kill him, you’re karmically responsible for murder. If you don’t kill him, you’re karmically responsible for the deaths of 6 million people. So even to say, “I will not kill,” could be seen as violent, if 6 million people are going to die because you couldn’t pull the trigger. This is an extreme example, but I think that in small, less dramatic ways, these kinds of situations do arise in life. So I can’t say that there is absolutely never a moment when violence is called for.

The more awake we get, the less we see life in absolutes. Enlightened action doesn’t arise from absolutes. It comes from wholeness moving through you. You can’t say what wholeness is going to do. It might do one thing through one person, and another thing through another person. It might move through the Dalai Lama and cause him to say, “We will not fight the Chinese,” but it could move through another enlightened being who says, “We’re not going to let the Chinese in here, because they’re going to massacre people.” It could have gone either way with an enlightened being — at least, in my view. Of course, that’s more ambiguity than most people are comfortable with. 

Safransky: Could killing animals to eat them come from wholeness?

Adyashanti: Sure. Life is killing. If we eat a vegetable, we’ve killed it. If we eat an animal, we’ve killed it. To be a living organism is to kill. There is no life without death. When we die, we’re going to be nutrients for something else.

I don’t see life as “anything goes,” but I have seen wholeness move through different people in different ways. That’s why I’m always talking about action that comes from wholeness, not from division, nor rejection, nor grasping, nor pushing away. What motivates us when we’re not pushing or grasping, not relying on conditioned concepts of right and wrong, good and bad? Is there something else that can move us? And what is that? Action that is an expression of a clear and undivided state of consciousness is what the Buddha meant by “right action.” To exercise right action we must be functioning from a place outside of all egoic self-interest. We must be awake within the dream and be able to express that perspective.  

Safransky: What feelings do you experience when you watch the news or read about what’s happening in the world?

Adyashanti: Usually a whole conglomeration of feelings at once. Sometimes there will be a bombing, and I’ll feel the pain of it. That’s part of being enlightened, I think: you’re open to the suffering around you. You can experience it. Those kinds of emotions will run through me, and also an underlying sense — an almost irrational sense — that all is unimaginably well. It couldn’t possibly be more well. And, in the midst of its being totally well, there can be pain. It’s not that one erases the pain. I think if the sense of well-being is immature, it does erase the other. Sometimes you hear people say they’ve had the perception that all is well, and you can feel the ego hiding behind it. It’s comfortable there. It feels good. It’s nice. In my experience, the truth is that all is well, and, at the same time, all isn’t well. I can’t explain it, but it doesn’t feel like a paradox to me. It doesn’t feel contradictory. It just feels like that’s the way things are.

To me the sign that someone is really starting to feel the truth is when they have a sense of well-being and fearlessness, and yet they still feel the suffering of others, and they still respond. They don’t just hide out in heaven. As one Buddhist teacher said, “Everybody knows not to get stuck in hell, but not everybody knows not to get stuck in heaven.” That’s one of the temptations of a spiritual life. We do enter the heaven realms, the untouched realms, the deathless realms, the fearless realms, the all-is-well realms, and they have a truth to them. But the truth is beyond heaven and hell. It’s beyond “all is good” and “all isn’t good.” It’s the third thing that holds both of these without any contradiction.

Safransky: One of the ways into that heaven realm for some people is consciousness-altering drugs. Have you had any experience with those?

Adyashanti: In my younger days I tried them a couple of times. It was interesting, but I had the sense, even then, that I was sneaking into the temple without permission. I’m not saying it’s wrong to take drugs. Some people have transformative experiences; for many it starts them down the spiritual path. But I instinctively knew that this wasn’t the real thing, but rather just an interesting vacation. My subsequent experiences showed me that you can enter similar realms through various disciplines and practices, but those realms, too, are impermanent. They come and go. They have the sense of ultimate reality, but they’re not. There is something deeper that is manifesting them. Both drugs and spiritual experiences are easy to get caught up in. There are probably as many spiritual-experience junkies as there are other kinds of junkies. They will spend all their money and follow any goofball anywhere if that goofball promises them the experience they crave. So spiritual experiences are fine. They’re part of the path, and they’re very pleasant, but don’t mistake them for reality.

Safransky: So that sense of well-being that underlies everything — that’s not a spiritual experience?

Adyashanti: I call that a “byproduct” of the realization of truth. There are other byproducts: a sense of happiness or freedom; being prone to fall into silly reveries at the drop of a hat. Yet, as soon as we think those byproducts are the awakening itself, we become attached or even addicted to them, and we miss their source. So I’m not grounded in those experiences. I’m not grounded in the experience of well-being. In fact, I couldn’t care less about how I feel. It just became irrelevant at some point. To be rooted in something deeper was . . . I can’t say it felt better, because it didn’t. It just has an effect on you. It makes it easier not to be attached to things, because you see them as irrelevant. 

Safransky: Psychotherapy is one way people try to understand themselves better. What are its advantages and limitations?

Adyashanti: I would guess that the vast majority of people who come to see me, or any other teacher, would probably do well with a little help from a good psychologist. I think psychologists can offer tremendous aid to people who are trying to transcend their conditioning. Going to a psychologist is not the only route, however. There are other ways to deal with conditioning, too. Somehow or other, the conditioning will need to be addressed, either before awakening or after awakening. You can have direct experiences of deep reality, but if you have too much psychological conflict, or your ego is still too fractured and not functioning coherently, it will keep holding you back. Ego, by its very nature, is never completely coherent, but well-functioning egos are nicer to be around. 

Saunders: How do you define “ego,” and what happens to it upon awakening?

Adyashanti: To me, ego isn’t this thing that we need to get rid of. It’s like a verb: a phenomenon, a movement of thought that alters and distorts perception. It causes us to see ourselves as occupants of a world that is quite distinct and different from us, and to see everybody and everything in that world as separate from us. So that movement of mind and belief is what I would call “ego.”

After you awaken, you no longer identify with ego. You don’t see it as real. All the ways that it divides us no longer seem real or even rational, but rather like forms of insanity. Statements about the ego “disappearing” miss the mark. The ego is still there; you just see it to be an illusion.

Saunders: How can we avoid deluding ourselves about our spiritual progress and underestimating the power of our conditioned human impulses?

Adyashanti: You’re on your own there. You’re better off if you have your integrity intact, but if you’re determined to fool yourself, you will, and no one will be able to save you from doing it. So take responsibility for yourself and don’t put it on others. If you do that simple thing, you will find it harder to delude yourself and underestimate your impulses. It all comes down to your intention. If you have the inner integrity, it will protect you.

Safransky: How has being married helped you on your path?

Adyashanti: I’m not exactly sure. I can tell you I’m happy to be married. I enjoy spending time with my wife. As a teacher, I find it’s nice to have someone who doesn’t relate to you as “the teacher.” I can stay in this teaching environment only for so long before I need to take a break: a walk in the woods or an encounter with someone who doesn’t like me. I don’t know how someone could possibly be “the teacher” all the time. I’ve told my wife, and also my mother, “Look, I am counting on you to keep an eye on me as a teacher. If you ever see me going down some avenue that you think is wrong, you tell me.”

Safransky: Has either of them ever waved the red flag?

Adyashanti: Not so far. But I think they would. They’re not so enamored of me that they wouldn’t speak up.

To answer your question about how marriage has helped, I have to say that the second awakening I told you about happened shortly after I’d gotten married. Funnily enough, it happened on St. Patrick’s Day, and my wife comes from an Irish family. Looking back, I see there was a sense of stability in my life because of our marriage. Something in me was more able to relax and really let go. But marriage isn’t the answer to everything. When we got married, I thought, This is better than I ever hoped it would be. Then I thought, It’s not enough. It was enough in terms of the relationship. It was more than enough. But, in that deepest place within me, I realized that it wasn’t enough, and it never will be, not until whatever is inside me, spiritually, is completely, absolutely addressed. That realization was useful, too. In the back of our mind we often hold out this hope, If I could just meet the right person . . . But then, even if it’s great, it’s not going to be enough.

Safransky: Your retreats are so popular you’ve started holding a lottery to decide who can get in. How have you dealt with that success? You don’t look burdened by it.

Adyashanti: Fortunately I have good people to support me. This organization, Open Gate Sangha, has grown up around what I do, and I actually do less organizing now than I did five years ago. My support staff takes care of it a whole lot better than I ever could. I am, of course, making sure that this truth that we talk about in the abstract is reflected in how we’re running the whole operation. It’s a challenge to translate spiritual truth into a policy that you can put on paper or talk to people about.

The success has been pretty surreal. I just never dreamed of it. My teacher taught in her living room in Los Gatos, California. Almost nobody knew about her. I don’t think she ever had more than fifteen students. She didn’t wear robes. So I thought I would teach in my living room on the weekends. I still walk in the door of a retreat center and think, Why are there more than twenty-five people here? Why are all these people coming to see me? I’m really just a voice for this. This isn’t about me. And the bigger it gets, the more obvious it becomes that it has nothing to do with me. I just happened to fall into the position of being the voice for something.

Saunders: Some spiritual teachers talk about a new state of consciousness for humanity on the horizon, an evolutionary leap, a New Age. Do you see any evidence of this?

Adyashanti: Not much. [Laughs.] In fact, I see a lot of evidence to the contrary. Of course, I really hope I’m wrong.

To equate enlightenment with the evolution of consciousness for humanity is to absolutely misunderstand what enlightenment is all about. And it’s nothing new. People have been saying for thousands of years that we’re on the cusp of “a new state of consciousness,” and they will for thousands more. By and large, it is a mechanism for putting ourselves to sleep rather than waking up. Most people who think they’re part of the greater awakening of humanity are actually just aggrandizing their own egos. The truth is we don’t know the future. We can’t know the future. One of the best ways to stay asleep is to wait for a future when we’ll all be awake. But, like I said, I hope I’m wrong. If the whole world wakes up tomorrow, I’ll be glad that I was wrong. 

Safransky: What’s the single most important piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to awaken?

Adyashanti: Get in touch with what you really want. What does awakening mean for you? Do you want it because it sounds good? Then you’ve borrowed someone else’s idea of it. What is it that’s intrinsic to you? What’s been important to you your whole life? If you touch upon that, you are in touch with a force that no teacher or teaching could ever give you. You are quite on your own in finding it. No one can tell you what that is. Once you feel it, once you’re clear on it, everything else will unfold from there. If you need a teacher, you’ll find one. If you need a teaching, you’ll bump into it, probably in the most unexpected way.

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