AWAKENING IS ONLY
THE FIRST STEP
To be attached to things is illusion;
To encounter the absolute is not yet enlightenment.1
THE SANDOKAI
Three years after an initial awakening had ended all seeking, I met my teacher Adyashanti when we both were speakers at the same conference. As soon as he spoke, a transmission began that I knew I needed. Because my spiritual search had ended, I rather naïvely thought I was “done.” Life seemed simple and satisfying. Just as I had not been looking for a guru when Ramana Maharshi showed up, I was certainly not looking for another teacher at this point. And yet, shortly after this conference, life moved for me to attend a retreat with him in the high Sierras. During that retreat I began to feel a deep and mysterious remembrance of, and pull toward, the Zen Buddhist lineage that seemed to flow through Adya’s words and being. I felt that grace had delivered a living Buddha into my life.
I had no thought that I would actually be able to meet with him one-on-one after the retreat, but I summoned up courage to write and ask, and in a happy surprise I was able to do so. When we met, I told him I had a fantasy that one day he would give me a mala and a name. He said he had the mala but not a name, and he gave me a wrist mala made of seeds. He also gave me an article on the ten Zen Ox-herding pictures, which are descriptions of the stages of enlightenment, including the letters of a young woman to her Zen teacher. She was ill and traversed many stages of the post-awakening process very quickly before her early death. This article made me a bit uneasy, as I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, and I wondered if he knew something I did not about my life expectancy.
AWAKENING TO THE INFINITE IS ONLY HALFWAY AROUND THE CIRCLE
In spending time with Adyashanti, I soon learned that awakening to the Infinite—beautiful and profound as that is—is only coming halfway around the circle of awakening. How does the Mystery that awakens itself within us want to function within the body-mind? How does it want to be embodied in daily life? I saw I had been stuck in emptiness, caught in identification with the Absolute, seeing everything from that perspective, and not paying much attention to the relative world.
Adyashanti seemed to light a fire to the dry grass I did not know needed to be burned within me. It was a time of seeing the many places in myself that were continuing to hold on to a separate identity, even in the face of realization that all was One. It was a time of great humbling and of increasing acceptance of and tenderness for our humanness.
CORE BELIEF
During one retreat, I came face-to-face with a core belief around separation—so many losses over lifetimes and in this life as well. Grief spilled out and out until at one point, the Truth in me asked, “Is this grief, now, authentic, or am I wallowing?” At the time the question arose, I knew it was the latter. Truth seemed to force me to look into each one of my “separation” stories and ask, “Is it true?” Then, when I had been through them all and had seen through the illusion of each one, Truth held my beliefs to the fire and made me go through the old stories all over again to confirm the understanding.
Here the inquiry was: Is it true? Can you absolutely know your beliefs about separation are true? What is the truth about this belief, this feeling? Dropping the questions into the silence of true nature led to the realization that in the Truth of what we are, we have never been separate or separated. To maintain the story of separation, we must identify ourselves as separate.
Core stories or beliefs may be encountered before or after an awakening. They are the conditioned ways ego essentially sees itself and the world. We maintain them by rigidly holding them as true while ignoring evidence that might contradict them. Core stories often include such beliefs as: I am flawed. I am deficient. I am unlovable, stupid, weak, a failure, invisible, a mistake, and so on. They can exist consciously or unconsciously, but as the Truth that has awakened within begins to move more and more consciously in our system, we will see these stories when they appear and will be invited to inquire into the truth of the beliefs and feelings that maintain them.
The willingness to see the stories that maintain suffering and to allow them to be dismantled is actually a movement of love. The love that moves from the Heart of Awareness sees clearly, without judgment, our places of contraction, identification, or holding. It moves us to see what holds the stories in place, what they are made of, and whether they are actually true. As awakening unfolds to live itself more fully in its human expression, it is not enough to simply know that deep truth and love exist as our essence; we are invited to BE that truth and love more and more consciously in ourselves and in the world. The end of the search means only that we are invited to BE the truth, love, peace, understanding, compassion, and clarity of our Buddha nature in our daily lives.
HOW DO TRUTH AND LOVE WANT TO MOVE WITHIN YOU?
Are you moved to tend your vegetable garden, smile at a stranger, spend quality time with your friends, children, or grandchildren, or simply to be deeply present to the moment? Do you feel moved to feed the hungry, work for peace, help refugees who come from countries ravaged by war? All of these are actions that may appear spontaneously from the love you are. There is no “should,” but there may be a movement that compels you to address issues or give attention to causes or people you feel passionate about. What might it be to address them from a place of peace and love within yourself? Some people march for peace with no peace in their hearts. Begin to sense in yourself where an action is coming from. Are we serving Truth or ego? Ego will not be able to know. That is why we spend time in silence, becoming familiar with the felt sense of this Heart of Awareness. It illuminates egoic thought but is not caught by it. It seems to love even what our mind may have imagined was unlovable.
NO STRATEGIES
It would be foolish to imagine that there is a prescription or strategy one could use for living awake. What is awake is that which sees its own infinite potential unfolding in infinite ways, moment to moment. It is not the egoic mind that figures out “how to” live awake. Egoic thought is what is always trying to control both inner and outer life, trying to improve a “self,” trying to “become,” trying to be the agent of “awakened” living.
Of course, from an egoic perspective, it is preferable to live among egos that want to be present, kind, compassionate, and loving, but these qualities are actually inherent in our true Heart. The “how to” playbooks—while they might be helpful or inspiring—often arouse our judging mind, which then compares our actual experience with the “high” or “holy” guidelines we might read about. It is more helpful to keep returning again and again to the Heart of Awareness for guidance. Life has moved itself up to this point; does our mind imagine it will stop doing so because we now know we are more (and less) than we originally were conditioned to believe?
After an initial awakening, many return to ego—now spiritual in flavor—to try to figure out how. It seems innocent enough in its inception, but over time this reifies a separate self that will once again try to assert its importance as a major player. This is a bit ironic, since the discovery may very well have been that there IS no separate entity, only a movement of conditioned thought, feeling, and so forth.
This is not to say that after an awakening there is an automatic knowing of what it feels like to live awake in any given moment. In fact, the ambition for a self to be consciously aware of awareness in every moment is more ego. What is awake has no ambition to become itself. It cannot be anything else! Yet, as my teacher’s teacher used to say, we start out like baby Buddhas, not yet knowing how to walk in our newfound freedom. Here is where one’s integrity, deep and authentic intentions, and devotion to Truth come in.
AWAKENING REVEALS WHAT HAS BEEN HIDDEN
Whether before or after an awakening, most of our challenges deal with what is born and dies, suffers, is changeable, and often is confounded by its human incarnation. Truth seeks to bring into the light the dark, repressed aspects of the human psyche to heal us of our divisions. This can often feel confusing to the seeker who imagined awakening would only bring bliss, peace, or joy. Yet it is frequently the case that after an authentic awakening, many things we thought we had dealt with or we did not know even existed will come forth to be seen and transformed. Such transformation is not about improving a “self” but, rather, is the outcome of our sincere desire to see the places and the moments where we may not be aligned with the Truth we have realized. Seeing these moments does not mean we could not be awake. This post-awakening investigation is not to rid us of what arises but to enable us to see with clarity, love, and compassion our innocent misunderstandings. It is deep seeing and experiencing from the openness of Presence that transforms us.
DIRECT EXPERIENCE
Awareness moves as consciousness in the body-mind, but in itself it has no boundaries whatsoever. Thus, when we invite our own awareness into a difficult or painful felt sensation in the body or into our emotions, there is direct experience of what is awake, as well as of the moment itself. Right away, there is a softening, a lessening of judgment, an openness to feel whatever is here. Transformation begins immediately—not because we are trying to rid ourselves of anything, but because we are no longer separate from the moment, separate from our Being. Even if what we experience in the moment is a feeling of resistance, we are able to feel the energy of this resistance as simply what it is. We have allowed ourselves to have a moment unburdened from “shoulds” around our feeling state.
The fact that awareness has no boundaries does not mean that in our human interactions we do not sometimes need boundaries. Our inner knowing will sense when the well-being of the body-mind requires our moving away from toxic environments, whether physical or psychological.
HARMONIZING OF BODY AND MIND
Part of the post-awakening experience is bringing our body and mind more and more into alignment with the truth of no separation—from ourselves, from one another, from the Divine, from the moment as it appears. Healing of separation concerns itself with melting frozen concepts or frozen experience back into direct experiencing. When there is no resistance to the natural movement of life, we experience the flowing freedom of Being itself. Harmonization begins to happen on the level of mind, heart, and body. Life moves spontaneously, directing itself and continually harmonizing itself.