An Interview With Adyashanti -- Awakening (Excerpt)

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TS: Okay. Back to Adya in his early twenties. You're working at the bike shop.You're meditating. You're going on some retreats.

Adya: I had built a little zendo in the backyard, and I was meditating anywhere from two to four hours a day, consuming books by the hundreds, and doing a lot of writing and a lot of journaling. I was going at this spiritual thing from every angle that seemed reasonable. When I was in my early twenties, it was a different environment from what it is today. I didn't really have any peers. I didn't have anybody my age who was into this stuff. I rarely even talked about it to anybody. Most of the people that were in the practice were much older than I was, so it was very much a solitary thing for me.

TS: And at some point there was a shift of some kind?

Adya: The first shift came when I was twenty five. In my practice, I had been really pushing in a very aggressive. male way-pushing to storm the gates of enlightenment with a tremendous amount of effort and a lot of determination, because it was what I was used to. I grew up as an athlete and a competitive bike racer. And I was dyslexic. I learned to get what I needed and what I wanted by out-working everybody else. And so that's how I thought spirituality was going to work. And Zen almost fosters that. You know out-meditate everybody. Zen seems to unconsciously encourage that. And so for about six to eight months, I would be walking to work in Palo Alto, and I would be pushing myself, constantly asking, "What is this? What is this? What is this? What's true?"

I literally thought I was going to go crazy any day because I didn't think that a human being could sustain this sort of internal intensity for that long. I was fully expecting to end up in some psych ward some day, because I was literally pushing myself to some sort of psychological edge. Or being pushed.

So one day I'm sitting in my room and this well of intensity came up, and I thought, I've got to find out what's true, and I've got to find out right now. So I went into the backyard, and I sat down to meditate, and I made an incredible effort to still my mind and break through some barrier. I didn't even know what it was. And within a minute it was like I'd taken all of the effort over the last five years and stuffed it into about one minute.

All of a sudden I just realized, I can't do this. I can't do this. And as soon as I said, "I can't do this," I could feel everything relax at the same time. And, when everything relaxed there was-and this is the only way I can describe it - an inward explosion.

It was like someone plugged me into a wall socket. There was a huge inner explosion, and my heart started to beat harder and my breathing got labored and I thought I was going to die because my heart was beating faster than it had ever beat in my entire life.

Having been an athlete, I was very familiar with what my maximum heart rate felt like. And this was way, way, way beyond that. I literally thought my heart was going to burst. At some moment the thought occurred to me that whatever this energy was, it was going to kill me. l thought, l can't sustain this very long.

And the next thought I had was, if this is what it takes to find out what's true then, okay, I'm willing to die right now. It wasn’t a courageous thing or a macho thing, it was just a fact. It was: I'm willing to die. Period. That's it. And as soon as I said that to myself, and really meant it, the energy just disappeared. All of a sudden I was out in space. I just became space. All there was was space. Just infinite space. And in that space I could feel something like a download of insights, but they were happening so fast I didn’t even know what they were. It was like hundreds of insights every second. Like downloading computer program into your computer system. l felt like something was being downloaded into me so quickly that I couldn’t comprehend any of the pieces, but I could feel the popping of insights.

So I sat there being space and just having these insights downloaded into my system, and that happened for awhile, I don't know how long, for awhile. And then it stopped and, at some point it became obvious that I should get up off my cushion, l did what I always did: 

l got up and looked at the Buddha figure that I had on a little altar, and I bowed to it. And as soon as I bowed to it, I just burst out laughing. It was the most hilarious laughter I’d ever had.

The funniest thing is that I thought, "You little son of a bitch," referring to Buddha, "I've been chasing you for five years." And at that moment, I knew what it was I had been chasing. I got it. And I just couldn’t believe it. It was like, wow, I've been chasing what I already was. So I had a great laugh and walked outside. That was the first awakening.

The funny thing is that by the time I got outside, this little voice, which I've become very used to hearing from that point on, said right in the middle of this huge revelation of happiness and bliss and tremendous relief, "This isn't it. Keep going."

And I thought damn, don't I get to just groove here? Even for a moment? But that little voice still said, "This isn't it. Keep going." And I knew it was true. Somehow I knew that this voice wasn't discounting what was happening. The voice wasn't saying, "This is of no value, this isn't true, this isn't relevant. "This voice was saying,

"There's more to this. You haven't seen the whole thing. You've seen a very significant part, but keep going. Don't stop here."

But at that moment everything changed. From that moment on my spiritual seeker energy - that desperate drive-disappeared and was never to come back again. It made no sense to get all worked up trying to attain something that I already had, trying to become what I knew I already was.

TS:What would you call this experience? You had "foretastes" when you were young; this was a..?

Adya: I would call it an awakening.

TS: Okay.

Adya: But I didn't comprehend what I had awoken to. What I realized was that I was what I was seeking. I knew that:

I am what I am seeking. I am this truth. And then right away, the next question arose: What is this? I am it. I know I am it. But I don’t know what it is.

That is the part I didn't know. There was an awakening, but it wasn't complete. It was a part of the picture, may be a big part of the picture, but a next question arose almost immediately: What is this? And that became the next question for me. I continued to meditate a lot. From the exterior, I was doing everything I did before, because I knew  there was more, and meditation was my way of exploring.

But from that point on, most of what happened spiritually didn't really happen on the cushion. Most of what happened spiritually over the next five or six years was actually happening in my daily life. I was an athlete, and I had a lot of identity wrapped up in being an athlete.

So even after that awakening, even though by that time I was not racing bikes anymore, I was still riding and training as if I was a competitive bike racer. And I started to question, why am I doing this? Why am I training as if I'm a world-class athlete when I'm not? I started to see that it was about some remnant of a self-image. It was a very good self-image to have you could say, not just being physically fit, but the image that goes along with being a very high-caliber athlete.

TS: You're cool.

Adya: Yeah, you’re cool. You're sort of physically domineering. And although I didn't act domineering toward people in my daily life, athletically I certainly was domineering. Even when I started to realize that I was simply perpetuating my old self-image, for some reason I couldn't stop.

Then when I was about twenty-six years old, I developed an illness nobody could diagnose. It put me in bed for about six months. I was somewhat functional, but pretty much not functional. Just ill. Sick. One thing after another with no let up for six months.

At the end of six months, of course, there's not much of the athlete left. And it felt wonderful when the athlete had been taken out of my system, because it is hard to be the dominant athlete persona when you're weak as a kitten. And I realized, this feels great. It felt so good to be rid of that persona. It felt very liberating.

I wish I could say that was the end of the story. But a year later, when I found myself healthy again, I woke up one day and started training, not even consciously. I just started doing the whole thing all over again. I didn't realize what I was doing until I was well into it, and then I thought, I'm doing it again. And I know what it's about. It's about this self-image, this persona. And I would have liked to just let go of it when I realized what I was doing, but I wasn't ready. 

So I got another six-month illness, and this one was worse. I had a sinus infection, a lung infection, and mononucleosis. And that pretty much did it for that self-image.

Once the persona was removed by that illness, the desire to rebuild it really didn't return. To me, that is a spiritual unfolding. It’s not getting rid of your self-image through meditation... it’s just the school of hard knocks.

It's an intelligence that takes over and puts all of us through whatever we need to go through to get us to let go.

During that time, I also went through what I would call a totally ridiculous relationship, which was very unhealthy.

The relationship pulled on my unresolved shadow material. You fall in love with all of your weaknesses, and it elicits the worst from you. In my case, the relationship elicited various roles like the helper, and of course that was a total disaster.

Fortunately, it ended after awhile, but it was similar to the illnesses-it wrenched out of me all of these images, all of these personas that I had gotten used to being-a good person, a nice person, the helper, all of that stuff. It ripped them out of my system and showed me that they were false and phony, and the only reason that I wore them was because I was afraid of not wearing them. Who would I be without them?

Between those illnesses and this relationship, I was really torn apart. The falseness was torn out of me bit by bit. And when that part was done, I really felt quite free. It was quite wonderful. I was back in the emptiness and realized how to be space in a simple, human way. To just stand in the middle of a sidewalk and not feel like I had to be anybody or appear as anybody.

The desire to be seen in any particular way had been torn out of my system. And the tearing out wasn't easy and it wasn't fun, but the end result was simply fantastic. Looking back, that set me up for what I would call my "final awakening." The awakening that was totally clear came on the heels of these tearing-out experiences. Actually, it came a few months later, soon after Annie and I got married.

I was thirty-three years old, and I had just gotten married and I had gotten a real job. I'd started to be an apprentice with my father in his business, and so I was getting a real career. I was also getting out of this rut-having my life focus specifically on an inward form of spirituality-which had been my focus up until this point.

I'd put everything in my life on hold for a long time. And then at about thirty-three years old, I realized this process may not complete itself, and I better get on with my life. So I ended up getting married and getting a real job.

I see this willingness to engage with life as being a very important part of my personal spiritual progress. And a couple of months after Annie and I got married and on St. Patrick's Day, which is kind of funny because Annie comes from a totally Irish family and Irish heritage-that's when the

second awakening happened.

TS: Do you have any sense that the marriage created the stability necessary for this second awakening?

Adya: Very insightful. Yes. I can't know that for sure, but since then I've thought that there was a missing element in all of this, which was a kind of stability. Now I had a career that I could make enough money to live on, and I was married to a wonderful person.

And at this point, an insight came to me that was very vital. When I met Annie and we got married, I knew that this was more than I ever thought was possible in a relationship. I could not have ever dreamed of a relationship of this quality.

That's just the way it was, and is. And that realization played a significant role because one morning I woke up and said to myself,

"This relationship is better than I ever dreamed possible, and it's not enough."

Not like the relationship needed to be more, because it didn't need to be anything different. Although the relationship was totally satisfying, I thought;

"This has not completed me; this has not taken me to where I've always been pulled to so inside."

Knowing that was sort of shocking. You can be very happy in life, be on your way, and not really have to suffering driving you, and yet still realize that even all of this is not enough. It doesn't even touch this place inside.

So I had stability in my life, and I think it allowed a real spontaneous letting-go to happen. Because in a human sense, there was something to let go into.

TS: Can you describe what happened?

Adya: It was very simple and it actually started before it started. The night before, right before I was ready to go to sleep, I sat on the edge of the bed and had this thought. It wasn't a big thought; it wasn't a big insight. It was the simplest thing and totally out of context from what I was thinking at the moment.

But this thought ran through my mind that said: "I'm ready." I noted it; literally within five seconds I noted it. And I went to sleep, but the sense of "I'm ready" was so plain and so simple. And it wasn't my mind or my ego saying, "I'm ready, ready to storm the gates!" It was just this innocent, simple moment, like a gift. Fact. Just a thought: "I'm ready." And I thought nothing of it. it didn't gather much attention except I noticed that it was happening. So I went to sleep.

The next day, l got up early because I was going to see my teacher, and I usually got up early to do a little meditation before I went to see her.

I wasn't thinking anything in particular and I just sat down and within thirty seconds I heard a bird. Just a chirp. And a question that I'd never heard, that I'd never used in practice, came from my guts rather than from my head. A question spontaneously arose, and it said, "Who hears this sound?" And as soon as that question happened, everything turned upside down, or right side up. And in that moment, the bird, the sound, and the hearing were all one thing. 

Literally, they were experienced as exactly the same... the hearing was no more me than the sound and the bird and anything. And it was very quick, very sudden, and it was just one. And then the next thing that was noticed was some thought. It was so distant I didn't even know what the thought was about. But there was thought, and then there was the recognition that that's not me. That's thought.

And this that woke up, this that was awake, had nothing to do with that thought whatsoever. It was just happening. The two were completely separate. There was zero identity in the thought.

And so after a few minutes, I got up. And I literally had these five-year-old ideas in my head. Very curious. I thought, I wonder if I'm the stove. And so I trotted out to the little living-room area and kitchen area and sure enough, this was the stove. And I trotted into the bathroom and looked at the toilet, because I was trying to look for something that was really unspiritual and I thought, I'll be damned, this was the toilet. And I opened the bedroom door and looked in and Annie, my wife, was sleeping, and I went: it's her. This is her, and it's the same.

And I walked around our little 450-square-foot cottage that we lived in for six-and-a-half years, and I looked around this cottage and everything was this, everything was the same.

So I'm just standing there in the cottage and interestingly there was no emotion. There was no yippee or oh my god. That was totally absent. Everything was seen totally clearly and not mistake with any state of experience, because there wasn't any state happening. And then walked a few steps in the living room, because the living room was only a few steps long. And in those few steps, consciousness completely woke up. This is a hard thing to describe but it was completely, completely separate from the body.

And at that point, that's when I saw this string of images and immediately I knew, this that was awake knew immediately that I had been trapped in those images, what we might call incarnations. I thought those were me. I was asleep in those images, and it was so clear that this was not those. It wasn't trapped in those anymore. It wasn't confined to any of those forms including the current form. And I could see the current form was no more significant or real than a form fifty life-times ago. And there it was, just this awakeness, completely only itself. No form, no shape, no color, no nothing. No location but everywhere.

And at that moment there was a knowing that even though this awakeness was everything, this awakeness was also beyond being everything. That if this thing totally disappeared, all the forms and everything that I saw, if it all disappeared this would not diminish any, not even a teeny bit. It couldn't diminish. So that was pretty much the awakening.

With this also came a sense of being bigger and outside the body, that the body was happening within that awakeness or spirit. The body was in it rather than I was in the body. And then in the midst of that, this awakeness or consciousness also came back into the body. It was still outside, but now it was both outside and inside. It didn't just stay outside, it took occupancy again, but it took occupancy without confusion this time, without any identification. It was like putting on clothes in the morning; you just put on clothes. You don't think that you are your clothes; they're just something you wear. And it was just so clear that this form, that this particular personality, this guy formally known as Stephen Gray, that this was clothing.

This is his current incarnation, this thing that he is going to wear and function through. And the nice thing was the joy that came with it. Such a joy with the clothing, with the incarnation. With the personality there was such an intimacy and such absolute childlike joy. Almost like a young girl who puts on a Cinderella dress and looks in the mirror and feels, "Wow, this is so cool!" And there was just that sense of the amazement of form.

And then the last thing was I took another step, and it was like the first step I’d ever taken in my life. It felt like I'd just come out of the womb. It felt like being a baby who had just put his foot on the ground for the first time in his whole life.

And I literally looked down at my feet and just walked in circles because it was like a miracle - the feeling of the foot on the floor and walking and it was the feeling that to put my feet on the floor is a miracle, an absolute miracle. And every step was the first step. Everything was new and everything had this sense of intimacy and wonder and appreciation.

So for me, all of these things happened in quick succession to each other. The waking up out of the form and occupying form and the oneness with the form and the appreciation and realizing I'm not form. It was like everything was good. I didn't have to be outside the body; I didn't have to be beyond anything because everything was this.

I just knew at that time that this is a miracle: this life, this body. This is heaven, as messy as it is, as silly as it is, as wonderful and terrible as it is. This is, you know, the great joke. Walking in god’s hand looking for god.

That was it. It was actually very simple. Very, very simple. And what also came out of this was an enjoyment of the ordinary. There was no longer anything extraordinary that needed to happen-extraordinary experiences didn't need to happen, just an enjoyment of the ordinary. I could be talking about so-called truth or spiritual stuff or I could be talking to someone about football or groceries... all of a sudden it just didn't matter anymore.

And still to this day, I often tell people-they often don't believe me-but I say, "To me doing satsang and talking about just about anything are about equal."

The ordinary became totally satisfying. Of course it's very satisfying to see someone awaken or even to see him or her transform a bit. That is a kind of highlight, but there's just a love of the ordinary and to me that's one of the most beautiful things-that nothing extraordinary needs to happen in my life anymore. Just existing is a sort of a miracle.

TS: Adya. you call this : "final awakening," but what if you have additional awakenings in the decades to come that reveal an ever-deeper dimension of realization? Do you think this is possible?

Adya: I'm glad you brought that up. I call it final for a particular reason. When I say "final," I don't mean necessarily that another awakening can't happen. Of course it can. Who knows? Right? We never know. This is infinite after all.

But what I mean when I say final is that with this awakening;

I realized what I am in a totally clear way. It was realized without any emotion in a totally pure state.There was no energy to it. There was no elation.

And when I say final, I mean I saw it clearly. There wasn't anything that was being sought anymore; there wasn't another question left to be answered spiritually. 

So I call it final because it felt like a line of demarcation where a certain life and a certain journey took me to that point, and once I stepped beyond that place, it wasn't at all like it had been before. That journey in the way I had engaged it was very obviously and very cleanly finished. It was done. And it never was going to come back. And to me that's what I mean by final. Does that mean that there is not something else to see? There's always something else to see.

TS: You said that at twenty-five with you first awakening you realized that what you were seeking was you, but that you still had a question, " What is this?"

Adya: What is this? Yeah.

TS: So what did you discover in your final awakening?

Adya: That's a good question (laughs). I'll do my best, but it's an impossible question to answer.

TS: But you're not asking the question anymore.

Adya: No, the Funny thing is the answer to the question is that the question disappears. That's the answer to the question. It's not like you get a nice answer that you can put in your pocket.

TS: You can't say love and wisdom or something like that?

Adya: No, no. It's way before love and wisdom. It's the place love and wisdom come from. It's paradoxical but the more we know ourselves, the more we know what we are, the more we know that what we are is something that by its very nature can never be known. So you and I, we are the unknown, and since the unknown is the unknown it can't be known, not because there's any deficiency, but because the unknown by its very definition is the unknown.

So in Buddhism they might call it emptiness or the void or shunyata. In some sects of Judaism, it was traditionally thought of as a heresy to even mention the word of god in any form. And I think these kinds of directives come from this experience that is paradoxical-you know what you are but you know that you are a mystery.

You see we can't call it anything. 

We can't say anything about pure potential. There's nothing to know. We can only know something when potential has manifest and become something. But before that, it's pure potential. It's pure emptiness or pure intelligence or whatever you want to call it.

To me that's the paradox-l've come to know what I am, but now I know that I am that which can never be known, because that's its nature. And so the funny thing is that you in a way almost end up where you started. You start out not knowing who you are or what the ultimate reality is. The difference is you end up knowing that you are what you can never  know. 

So the mystery becomes conscious, it wakes up to itself. It knows itself, it's the "l AM" as it says in the bible. But there's no definition you notice; it's just "I AM." That's the mystery declaring itself. That's it.

TS: One of the interesting stories I've heard is that you didn't tell your Zen teacher about your second awakening until three months after it happened. That seems odd to me.

Adya: There just didn't seem to be any reason. It had such a sense of completeness. In one sense, it was extraordinary, but it also felt very ordinary. It didn't feel like something I needed to run off and tell someone. I didn't feel like I needed it confirmed. I didn't need for it to be heard. I didn't need someone to understand. It was the dropping away of all of those psychological needs.

And the only reason I actually told my teacher is that after about three months I reflected and I thought, oh, this is what she's been talking to me about for fifteen years and why she's putting so much of her heart and compassion into my process. I thought it might be nice for her to know. That's where the impetus to tell her came from.

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