The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world. It can be likened to the experience of waking up from a dream—a dream you didn’t even know you were in until you were jolted out of it. In the beginning of my teaching work, most of the people who came to me were seeking these deeper realizations of spirituality. They were seeking to wake up from the limiting and isolated senses of self they had imagined themselves to be. It’s this yearning that underpins all spiritual seeking: to discover for ourselves what we already intuit to be true—that there is more to life than we are currently perceiving.
This discovery I’m talking about is traditionally referred to as spiritual awakening, because one awakens from the dream of separation created by the egoic mind. We realize—often quite suddenly—that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs, and images, is not really who we are. It doesn’t define us; it has no center. The ego may exist as a series of passing thoughts, beliefs, actions, and reactions, but in and of itself it has no identity.
Ultimately all of the images we have about ourselves and the world turn out to be nothing but a resistance to things as they are. What we call ego is simply the mechanism our mind uses to resist life as it is. In that way, ego isn’t a thing as much as it is a verb. It is the resistance to what is. It is the pushing away or pulling toward. This momentum, this grasping and rejecting, is what forms a sense of a self that is distinct, or separate, from the world around us.
But with the dawn of awakening, this outside world begins to collapse. Once we lose our sense of self, it’s as if we have lost the whole world as we knew it. At that moment—whether that moment is just a glimpse or something more sustained—we suddenly realize with incredible clarity that what we truly are is in no way limited to the small sense of self that we thought we were.
This shift is not revolutionary; it’s the same as looking in the mirror in the morning and having an intuitive sense that the face you are looking at is yours. It is not a mystical experience; it is a simple experience. When you look in the mirror, you experience the simple recognition, “Oh, that’s me.” When the shift of perception that’s called awakening happens, whatever our senses come into contact with is experienced as ourselves. It’s as if we think with everything we encounter, “Oh, that’s me.” We don’t experience ourselves in terms of our ego, in terms of a separate someone or separate entity. It’s more a feeling of the One recognizing itself, or Spirit recognizing itself.
Spiritual awakening is a remembering. It is not becoming something that we are not. It is not about transforming ourselves. It is not about changing ourselves. It is a remembering of what we are, as if we’d known it long ago and had simply forgotten. At the moment of this remembering, if the remembering is authentic, it’s not viewed as a personal thing. There is really no such thing as a “personal” awakening, because “personal” would imply separation. “Personal” would imply that it is the “me” or the ego that awakens or becomes enlightened.
But in a true awakening, it is realized very clearly that even the awakening itself is not personal. It is universal Spirit or universal consciousness that wakes up to itself. Rather than the “me” waking up, what we are wakes up from the “me.” What we are wakes up from the seeker. What we are wakes up from the seeking.
In truth, we are not capable of imagining what it is that we are. Our nature is literally beyond all imagination. What we are is that which is watching—that consciousness which is watching us pretending to be a separate person. Our true nature is continually partaking of all experience, awake to every instant, to each and every moment.
Full awakening simply means that we perceive from the perspective of Spirit—from the view of oneness—all the time. From this awakened perspective, there isn’t any separation anywhere—not in the world, not in the universe, not in all the universes everywhere. The truth is anywhere and everywhere, at all times, in all dimensions, for all beings. It is a truth that is the source of everything that will ever be experienced—in life, after life, in this dimension or any other dimension.
From the perspective of the ultimate, literally everything—be it at a higher or lower dimension, here or there, yesterday, today, or tomorrow, everything—is but a manifestation of Spirit. It is Spirit itself that wakes up. So, ultimately, the trajectory every being is on, whether they know it or not, is a trajectory toward full awakening—toward a full knowing, toward a full experiential knowledge of what they are, toward unity, toward oneness.
Awareness opens up, the sense of the separate self falls away—and then, like the aperture on a camera lens, awareness closes back down. All of a sudden that person who had previously perceived true nonduality, true oneness, is quite surprisingly now perceiving back in the dualistic “dream state.” In the dream state, we’re back in our conditioned sense of self—in a limited, isolated sense of being. The good news is that once a moment of this clear seeing has actually taken place, the aperture of our awareness can never completely close down again. It may seem like it has closed down completely, but it never quite does. In the deepest part of yourself, you don’t ever forget. Even if you’ve only glimpsed reality for a moment, something within you is changed forever.
Reality is nuclear; it’s incredibly powerful. It’s unimaginably potent. People can experience a flash of reality in the time it takes to snap your fingers, and the energy and the force that enters into them as a result is life altering. Just one moment of awakening begins the dissolution of one’s false sense of self and, subsequently, the dissolution of one’s whole perception of the world. Awakening Is Not What You Imagine It to Be In a very real sense, it is much more accurate to talk about what we lose upon awakening rather than what we gain. We not only lose ourselves—who we thought we were—but we also lose our entire perception of the world. Separation is only a perception; in fact, when it comes to our world, there is nothing but perception. “Your world” is not your world; it is only your perception.
This is especially interesting since many of the people I teach have been studying spirituality for many years, and they often have very intricate ideas about what awakening is going to be like. But when it happens, it is always different from their expectations. In many ways, it is grander, but also in many ways, it is simpler. In truth, if it is to be true and real, awakening must be different from what we imagine it to be. This is because all of our imaginings about awakening are happening within the paradigm of the dream state. It is not possible to imagine something outside of the dream state when our consciousness is still within it.
With awakening there also comes a total reorganization of the way we perceive life—or at least the beginning of a reorganization.
while beautiful and amazing, often brings with it a sense of disorientation. Even though you as the One have awakened, there is still your whole human structure—your body, your mind, and your personality. Awakening can often be experienced as very disorienting to this human structure.
So it is the process that happens after awakening that I want to explore. As I’ve said, for a very few people, the moment of awakening will be complete. It will be final in a certain sense, and there will be no need for a continuing process. We might say that such people had an extraordinarily light karmic load; even though they may have experienced extreme suffering before awakening, one can see that their karmic inheritance, the conditioning that they were dealing with, wasn’t too deep. This is very rare. Only a few people in a given generation may wake up in such a way that there’s no further process to undergo.
In fact, the spiritual process isn’t any different before awakening than afterward. It’s just that, after awakening, the process is happening from a different perspective; you may think of it as a bird’s-eye view versus a ground-level view. Before awakening, we don’t know who we are. We think we are a separate, isolated person, in a particular body, walking around in a world that is distinct from us. Once awakening has happened, we are still walking around in that world; we just know that we are not limited to a particular body or personality and that we are actually not separate from the world around us.
The path after awakening, then, is a path of dissolving our remaining fixations—our hang-ups, you might say. So it’s not that much different from the path to awakening, which is path of dissolving certain delusions we have, certain tendencies to contract. The difference is that, before awakening, our personality structure feels much weightier, much heavier, much denser, because our whole identity is actually wrapped up in our conditioning. After awakening we know that the conditioning of our body-mind system is not personal; we know that it doesn’t define us. That knowledge, that living truth, makes it much easier and much less threatening to address the unraveling of our illusions. So there is a great similarity in what we’re doing spiritually before awakening and what we are doing afterward. We are doing it from a different perspective; before awakening we are doing it from the perspective of separation, and after awakening we are doing it from the perspective of nonseparation.
The Willingness to Question Everything
All of the words I use are intended as pointers. In Zen there is a saying: Don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. Even though we may hear that a hundred times, we still have a tendency to make the mistake, over and over. So while I use lots of words, set certain contexts, and use certain metaphors, I ask you to keep in mind that everything I am teaching must be awakened to. It must be lived for it to be real.
This one question—“What do I know for certain?”—is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it’s meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions—things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.
CHAPTER TWO Authentic Awakening—And the Disorientation That Can Follow Most of what we are told about awakening sounds like a sales pitch for enlightenment. In a sales pitch, we are told only the most positive aspects; we may even be told things that are not actually true. In the sales pitch for awakening, we are told that enlightenment is all about love and ecstasy, compassion and union, and a host of other positive experiences. It is often shrouded in fantastic stories, so we come to believe that awakening has to do with miracles and mystical powers. One of the most common sales pitches includes describing enlightenment as an experience of bliss. As a result, people think, “When I spiritually awaken, when I have union with God, I will enter into a state of constant ecstasy.” This is, of course, a deep misunderstanding of what awakening is.
There may be bliss with awakening, because it is actually a by-product of awakening, but it is not awakening itself. As long as we are chasing the by-products of awakening, we will miss the real thing. This is a problem, because many spiritual practices attempt to reproduce the by-products of awakening without giving rise to the awakening itself. We can learn certain meditative techniques—chanting mantras or singing bhajans. for example—and certain positive experiences will be produced. The human consciousness is tremendously pliable, and by taking part in certain spiritual practices, techniques, and disciplines, you can indeed produce many of the by-products of awakening—states of bliss, openness, and so on. But what often happens is that you end up with only the by-products of awakening, without the awakening itself.
The sincere call from reality to reality, the sincere call to awaken, is a call that comes from a very deep place within us. It comes from a place that wants the truth more than it wants to feel good. If our orientation is simply to feel better in each moment, then we’ll continue to delude ourselves, because trying to feel better in the moment is exactly how we delude ourselves. We think our delusions are making us feel better. In order to awaken, we must break out of the paradigm of always seeking to feel better. Of course, we want to feel better; it’s part of the human experience. Everybody wants to feel good. We are hardwired to seek more pleasure and less pain. But there is an even deeper impulse within us, and that is what I describe as the impulse to awaken.
I could go on and on, but essentially what is important to realize is that spiritual awakening is very different from having a mystical experience. Mystical experiences are beautiful. They are in many ways the highest and most pleasurable experiences that a “me” can have. The “me” is always seeking union.
am not saying that mystical experiences have no value, and I am not saying they aren’t transformative, because they often are. Mystical experiences can change the structure of the egoic self to a radical degree, and often in very positive ways. So in the relative world of things, mystical experiences have a value. But when we are talking about spiritual awakening, we are not talking about personal experience. We are talking about awakening from the “me.” We are talking about going from one paradigm to a completely different paradigm, from one world to another.
One of the Hallmarks of a True Awakening Is the End of Seeking With a true and authentic awakening, who and what we are becomes clear. There’s no longer a question about it; it is a done deal. In this way, one of the hallmarks of a true awakening is the end of seeking. You no longer feel the momentum, the push and the pull. The seeker has been revealed as the virtual reality it always was, and as such it disappears. The seeker has in some sense accomplished its task. It provided the necessary momentum to help propel consciousness or Spirit out of its identification with the dream state and helped it to return back to its natural state of being.
Then, all of a sudden, awakening happens. The seeker, the seeking, and the whole egoic structure that gets built up around the spiritual quest is suddenly gone. This identity is seen to be what it is—rather meaningless and not useful—and it falls away.
The Honeymoon of Awakening
This dropping away of the seeker can be experienced as a huge relief. It marks what I like to call the honeymoon of awakening. At least for me, this dropping away of the seeker and seeking was experienced as if an enormous weight had been taken off my shoulders. It was a very physical experience. I…
This honeymoon may last for a day, a week, six months, or a couple of years. It varies for different people. What characterizes the honeymoon period is complete flow—there is no resistance in your being, in your experience. Everything is flowing. Life is a flow; everything just seems to happen of its own volition. It is the experiential knowledge that everything is actually being done. that you as a separate entity aren’t doing anything. In the deepest sense, this honeymoon is an experience of complete and utter nonresistance. Within this nonresistance, life flows wonderfully and beautifully, almost magically. Things show up when they need to show up. Decisions are made without actually deciding them; everything has a sense of obviousness. It is the experience of Spirit completely unhindered, uncorrupted by illusion, conditioning, or contradiction. This flow…
In today’s society, most of us having these realizations are not living in monasteries; we are not in a particularly supportive environment. In fact, in our society it is possible to have an amazing realization on Saturday and be back in the office on Monday morning. If your mind is still blown out in bliss, this can be very disorienting! Yet it’s the reality of the situation we live in. Most modern people do not have the luxury of sitting in a cave for a few…
The Disorientation That Often Occurs…
Much of our egoic motivation has disappeared, which can be very disorienting to the mind. It’s only at this particular point that people start to realize that almost everything that previously motivated them in life was self-centered. I do not mean that in a negative or judgmental way; I simply mean that the driving force propelling us through life when we are in the dream state is very self-centered. Our motivations have been fueled by “what do I want?” and “what don’t I want?” We’re constantly asking these questions. “What can I achieve? Who will love me? How much joy can I get? How much happiness can I get? How much unhappiness can I avoid? Can I get the…
Again, this is not bad or wrong; it’s just the way it is. The dream state is the state where we perceive separation, where we think we are a separate entity and a separate being. That separate being is always seeking something—love, approval, success, money, maybe even enlightenment. But with real…
There is still a human being there; we don’t disappear into a puff of smoke. Even our personality remains intact. Jesus had a personality; Buddha had a personality. Everybody who walks on the Earth has a personality. Infants, when they come out of their mothers’ wombs, have personalities. It is one of the beauties of being that each of us has a different personality. Dogs and cats, birds, even trees have different personalities. The difference is that once we have seen beyond the veil of separation, identification with our particular personality begins to dissolve. Even if we’ve seen very deeply and the transformation has been great, there is still a basic personality…
Somewhere inside I always knew that everything was one—that I was eternal, unborn, undying, and uncreated. I understood that my essential nature was not limited by or confined to my personality structure or the body I seemed to be inhabiting. There had been a dissolving, in a somewhat radical way, of the world as I had known it and of the self I had known myself to be. It was actually quite odd to be walking around without all of the motivations that previously informed my life. There was still a certain amount of self-centered motivation and egoic-centered energy. But there was also an immense amount of dissolution at the level of ego and at the level of the basic energy force that is derived from ego. I walked around saying to myself, “Well, why should I do this? Why should I do that? I’m not really motivated to do this anymore or that anymore.” The things I had previously…
People often come to me and say, “Gee, I used to have all these things I loved to do—I used to have hobbies, and I used to like to go to dinner parties. I used to be into kite flying,” or running, or whatever it was they had previously enjoyed doing. I tell them that it is common for some of these interests to start to wane, especially if their interest in the activity had been fueled by the energy of separation. With these…
But awakening itself is not the same as egoic dissolving. We can wake up whether the ego has dissolved or not. In fact, very strong and even destructive egos can awaken. Awakening begins the process. The result of the…
But this dissolution, when it takes place, can be very disorienting. Awakening itself can be very disorienting. Everything you thought was true, you now see is not. The person you thought you were, you now see you are not. That itself can be blissful and a tremendous relief, and it can simultaneously be experienced as disorienting. “Who am I going to be now? What’s going to move me? What’s going to motivate this human being?” Of course, if one is fully awake, one does not have these questions. But that is rare initially. For most people, there is a further process after awakening. So for most people…
The disorientation arises because the mind is struggling to orient itself in a new context. It’s like you are falling out of a plane. If…
no problem. But as soon as you start to grasp at space as if to find your bearings, you feel very disoriented; you realize you don’t know…
So disorientation is not necessarily inherent in the awakened view; it arises from the mind trying to find orientation. But one of the keys to the awakened view is that there is no orientation. Reality does not need an orientation. If there is an orientation, it is the orientation of a deep sense of relaxation, of allowing everything to be. Literally, you find your…
CHAPTER THREE “I Got It, I Lost It”
There’s a metaphor that I like to use to describe the journey from nonabiding to abiding awakening: that of a rocket ship. A rocket ship takes a tremendous amount of thrust and a tremendous amount of energy both to get off the ground and then to break the gravitational field as it travels through the sky and ultimately into space. If there is enough fuel in the rocket and it gets far enough away from the Earth, it can eventually get beyond the gravitational field of the planet. Once the rocket is beyond the gravitational field of the Earth, the Earth no longer has the power to pull it back down. As a metaphor, we can think of the egoic structure, or what I call the dream state, as the Earth. The dream state has a gravitational force; it has the tendency to pull consciousness into itself. This gravitational force is really what one is dealing with throughout the entirety of the spiritual journey. Awakening is breaking free of this gravitational force. Initially, it may simply be leaving the dream state, awakening from the dream state of “me” and separation and isolation. But because we’ve awakened does not mean that consciousness has gotten past the gravitational pull of the dream state. If we haven’t gone completely beyond this gravitational field, we’re going to be pulled back toward the experience of “me” and the perception of separateness.
This gives rise to what I call the “I got it, I lost it” phenomenon. People report having amazing realizations about the truth, but then the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year they feel they have lost it. It’s like a rocket ship that left the ground, got a few miles up into the atmosphere, and then ran out of fuel—and now it’s being pulled back toward Earth.
Using the metaphor of the rocket ship is a way of thinking about the process of awakening. The moment of awakening itself—going from the dream state to reality—isn’t a process. It always happens spontaneously. But as I’ve said, the dissolution of the ego takes time. While the moment of awakening is instantaneous, there is a process that unfolds thereafter—the process of getting beyond the gravitational force of the dream state.
“I’m Awake, But…” People come to me all the time and say, “Adya, I’m awake, but…” Of course, as soon as they say “but,” I know as a teacher that they are not awake in this moment. They may have had a moment when they broke through the confines of duality and perceived truth, but they have not experienced an abiding awakening; they are not awake right now. In terms of awakening, all that matters is right here and right now. What happened yesterday does not really have much to do with what is happening today. The question isn’t, “Have I had an awakening?” The question is, “Is awakening awake right here and right now?”
When someone comes to me and says, “Adya, I had an awakening,” the first thing I want to clarify with that person is whether or not the mind has already co-opted the awakening. Because if the person is saying “I” as an ego, as a “me,” had an awakening, that is just another illusion. If it is a true awakening, we know that it is not the “me” that has awakened. Awakedness woke up from the “me”; Spirit woke up from its identification with ego.
The ego does not awaken; the “me” does not awaken. We are not the ego; we are not the “me.” We are that which is awake to the ego and the “me.” We are that which is awake to the world, and we are the whole world as well, when seen from the true perspective. So as a teacher, I want first to find out if someone is claiming awakening from the standpoint of
This “I got it, I lost it” phenomenon is the struggle, as it were, between our true nature and our imagined sense of self. It means our consciousness is not yet beyond the gravitational field of the dream state of ego, and so we vacillate between our true nature and our imagined sense of self—back and forth, back and forth. This can be very disconcerting and can feel schizophrenic in a way. We’ve seen the deeper reality of things, and then we find ourselves back in the dream state. Part of us still knows the deeper reality; part of us knows that the egoic structure isn’t true. Part of us knows that whatever our mind believes, whatever interpretation it is making, is literally nothing but a dream in the mind and body. But the gravitational force of the dream state can still be very strong. Even as we know the truth of our being, we can still find ourselves believing in ego. While we may know that a thought has no validity, is absolutely untrue, we may find ourselves believing in it anyway.
How can you be in a conversation with somebody, saying things that are coming from ego, knowing where they’re coming from, but saying them anyway? This is very disconcerting. At this point, a lot of people will assume that somehow they have made a mistake; that something has gone terribly wrong. But what is important to know is that nothing has gone wrong. No mistake has been made. This is just the next phase in one’s awakening. It is the next unfolding.
Once you realize that there’s no problem here, you’ll see that there may still be some confusion and some pain, but it’s okay; vacillation can be very painful. In fact, it is much more painful to act in a way that we know is not true once we’ve seen that it is not true. Before we may have acted in ways that were based in untruth, but we didn’t know it—we were totally in the dream state. As Jesus said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” When we are in the dream state, we do not know what we are doing. We are simply acting out of deep programming. But once we have seen the true nature of things—once Spirit has opened its eyes within us—we suddenly know what we’re doing. There’s a much more accurate sense of whether we’re moving or speaking or even thinking from truth or not. When we act from a place of untruth anyway, in spite of our knowing, it’s much more painful than when we didn’t know our actions were untrue. When we say something to someone that we know is untrue, it causes an inner division that is vastly more painful than when we said the same thing and thought it was true. So with awakening, the stakes go up. The more awake we get, the higher the stakes get.
With each step you go, you have less and less tendency to look down. You have less tendency to act in ways you know aren’t true or to speak in ways you know aren’t true or do things you know aren’t coming from truth. You start to realize that the consequences have become greater; the more awake we get, the greater the consequences are. Finally, the consequences of acting outside of truth become immense; the slightest action or behavior that’s not in accordance with the truth can be unbearable to us.
This type of responsibility is not something we count on when we imagine awakening. We think that awakening will be a get out of jail free card. Initially we have a relationship with the spiritual freedom of awakening that is infantile. We think that freedom is a personal thing; that it is about feeling extraordinarily good and free. But freedom is…
As we become more conscious, we begin to see that there are consequences. There are consequences to everything, and they get bigger and bigger the more we behave in ways that are not in harmony with what we know is true. This is actually a wonderful thing. It is what I call fierce grace. It is not a soft grace; it is not the kind of grace that is beautiful and uplifting. But it is a grace nonetheless. We know…
Reality is always true to itself. When you’re in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law. To me, this knowledge is a grace. Reality is consistent. Argue with it, go against it, and it will hurt—every single time. It…
But this fierceness is also beautiful. It helps orient us deeper and deeper into our true nature. We realize that to behave from any place other than our true nature is destructive to ourselves and, just as important, to the world and others around us. The more we understand this…
The Momentum of Our…
Another word for conditioning is karma. Karma is a word that comes from the East and, without going into any esoteric meanings or explanations, means cause and effect. It refers to the conditioning we’ve received from our life experiences—the things we are predisposed to like or not like, based on our past experience. Our conditioning is in large part derived from our family of origin, the life we have lived, the situations we’ve been brought into, and life experiences that we’ve had. Parents and society condition our bodies and minds with their views, beliefs, morals, and norms. In this way we are…
Most human beings derive their entire sense of self from their conditioning. They are literally conditioned, told, and taught who they are. If you’re good, if you’re bad, if you’re worthy or unworthy, if you’re lovable or unlovable—all this is conditioning, and all this creates a false sense of self.
In the same way, we are conditioned to view the world in a certain way. We are taught to see the world through certain eyes. Some people think the world is a wonderful place; some people think it is threatening. Some people are prone to have a liberal point of view, some a more conservative point of view. All of this is part of the conditioning of the body and mind, and all of this goes into the construction of a dualistic view of life and a dualistic view of self. This dualism is what I mean when I talk about conditioning. At the moment of a real awakening, however, Spirit or consciousness is liberated from this conditioning. It suddenly wakes up from its own conditioned self, as if waking from a dream. Only when we have awakened from that conditioned, illusory self do we know the incredible weight and burden that such conditioning is. At the moment of awakening and maybe for quite some time afterward, the sense that conditioning could ever arise or become problematic again is completely foreign. This is one of the hallmarks of the awakened state—the sense that one could never again identify with the conditioned self. It seems unimaginable that we would ever go into a state of separation again. That sense of finality is inherent within the state of wakefulness.
For others it will be 90 percent. For still others, it will be somewhere in between. It’s hard to say why awakening affects one person’s conditioning one way and another person’s another way. I could make speculations and get into metaphysical discussions about what might be going on, but ultimately the why doesn’t matter. Either way, we are dealing with what we are dealing with. It’s apparent that each being has a different sort of karmic inheritance; each person has a different karmic load that he or she…
Asking the Right…
When a person’s awakening vacillates, he or she often asks me, “How do I stay in the awakened state?” That is asking the wrong question. In spirituality, it is important that we ask the right questions. To wonder how to stay in the awakened state is a totally reasonable thing to do, but the question itself is arising from the dream state. Spirit never asks itself, “How do I stay within myself?” That would be ridiculous. It just makes no sense, coming from the true nature of things. What makes more sense is to ask how you unenlighten yourself. What is still held on to? What is still confusing? What situations in life can get you to believe things that aren’t true and cause you to go into contradiction, suffering, and separation? What is it specifically that has the power to entice consciousness back into the…
There is no one way that people do it. People are pulled back by the gravitational force of the dream state for many reasons—unconscious assumptions and belief patterns that are still operating, unconscious conflicts that somehow survived the explosive nature of awakening and reconstituted themselves, various forms of conditioning. The process here becomes one of coming into right relationship with yourself and looking deeply at what it is that causes you to go back into the trance of separation.…
It is this gritty fabric of life where the spiritual rubber hits the road. What is required is the willingness to let life impact you; to let yourself see when life impacts you; to see if you go into any sort…
go into blame, if you go into “should” or “shouldn’t,” if you start to point the finger somewhere other than at yourself. It’s coming to grips with the fact that the only person who can cause us to suffer, who can cause us to misperceive illusion and separation, who has this much power, is us. Nothing in the exterior environment causes us to lose a sense of the awakened…
This is one of the most important realizations we can make. It’s all an inside job. It’s all something we do to ourselves—mistakenly,…
This is to our great advantage. It’s much easier to work with something if your sense of self is not being defined by it. It is much less frightening.
It’s as if you are in a car, barreling down the highway, and all of a sudden you pick your foot up off the accelerator. The moment your foot comes off is a metaphor for awakening. “Oh my God, this car doesn’t define me. Riding in this car doesn’t define me. My foot on the accelerator doesn’t define me. Where this car is going doesn’t define me. The environment that it’s traveling through doesn’t define me. None of this has anything to do with who or what I am.” That is what awakening reveals.
When we awaken, we are no longer fueling the trance of separation; we are no longer pumping energy into it. But even if you never put your foot back on the accelerator, the car still has momentum—karmic momentum. It doesn’t immediately come to a stop in…
That said, we can also add energy to the existing momentum. We have to watch and discover when it is that we hop back in and put our foot back on the accelerator. Every time we reidentify with conditioning or karma, every time we believe a thought, we are putting energy…
So the process after awakening involves learning how to keep your foot off the gas and recognizing what puts your foot back on. Even though it’s not personal—even though reidentification is totally spontaneous and it’s not happening to anybody and it’s…
In this, life itself is your greatest ally. As I’ve said, life is where the spiritual rubber hits the road. Life will show us where we are not clear. Being in relationship with life and others shows us clearly where we can still get hung up. If we have true sincerity, we are not going to try to hide in the memory of an awakened state; we are not going to hide in the…
What I’m getting at is that it is totally natural to seemingly be awake one moment and then seemingly be asleep the next. It is natural to feel like you have lost some of the realization you had last week or last month or last year. The most important thing is to know that it is natural. Nothing has gone wrong; everything has just gone to a deeper level. Your entire system is being dredged clean in a deeper way. You are now capable of seeing yourself in a clearer light, and you are capable of seeing your tendency to go into separation in a more vivid way. You are seeing things that were unconscious before. They drove you, without you having any real understanding of what was going on.…
Fixating on the Absolute as a Way to Avoid Our Humanness What I am teaching should not be mistaken for a self-improvement plan. This isn’t about becoming a perfect being. This is about seeing what causes division within oneself. That is very different from having the goal of becoming a perfect person, because awakening and enlightenment have nothing to do with becoming perfect, holy, or saintly. What is truly holy is perceiving from wholeness. which means not being divided inside. It is that which divides us inside that needs to be healed. What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided. As a spiritual teacher, getting people to this state of honesty, or suggesting that they go there, can be quite difficult. This is because there is a strong tendency in the egoic structure to use awakening as a reason to hide from all of one’s inner divisions. When I suggest some of the things I’m talking about here, like recognizing where we unenlighten ourselves, some of my students will say, “But there’s nobody to do that. There is no person here. The ego and person is an illusion, so there’s really no one to look inside.” From the perception of awakening, there isn’t a problem, even…
This is why I emphasize that an important part of this phase of the journey is the willingness, the sincere commitment, to be very honest with oneself. Yes, there is the absolute view. It’s true there is no problem; it’s true there is no separate…
What I’m speaking to is reality itself. Spirit is speaking to Spirit here. Reality is speaking to reality. It may sound like I’m talking to a person and directing a person, but I’m not. What I’m speaking about here is inherent within the perception of awakening itself. That which is awake always moves toward that which is not awake. That which is awake has no fear of that which is not awake. It doesn’t have any fear, because it doesn’t perceive anything as separate or other than itself. That which is awake…
But also, if we’re honest, we can notice that within the truth of our being there is an inherent movement toward the releasing of any limitation, toward the releasing of ourselves from the dream state. There is a desire, for lack of a better word, to release from hate, ignorance, greed, or any sense of confinement. The truth of our being is not content…
We need to ask: “What in me can still go into division? What in me can still go into hate, into ignorance, into greed? What in me can cause me to feel divided, isolated, full of sorrow? Where…
Its nature is undivided, unconditioned love. It doesn’t move away from that which is unawakened; it moves toward it. That within us which is awakened doesn’t move away from the contradictions in our thought patterns or behaviors. It doesn’t move away from fixations, it…
Now, why would they do that? If everything is perfect as it is, if nothing needs to change, if everything is holy and divine exactly as it is, if all is well even when all isn’t well, then why would these enlightened beings dedicate their lives to the welfare of others—what would be the point? Well, there wouldn’t be one. If the absolute view were the only view, they wouldn’t be doing it. I would suggest that the reason so many people who get that far in their own awakening end up dedicating themselves to the welfare of others is that they haven’t fixated on the absolute view. Without…
Reality is in the process of awakening all of itself to itself. And that part of the picture is going to be very hard to see if we fixate on the absolute view; if we use the absolute view to hide from our humanness. Our humanness is also divine, and our humanness…
For this process of complete awakening to fulfill itself, it is necessary to be totally sincere. This is very different from a therapeutic approach. We aren’t investigating ourselves to try to fix everything in order to be happy. That would be operating from the perspective of the dream state, and it might be useful if we were still in the dream state. But what I am talking about is a different motivation. It is recognizing the inherent nature of reality to awaken all of itself to itself. That’s what reality is doing. Inside of you and inside of everyone, reality is moving to wake all of itself up to itself. Everything within our human structure is going to be uncovered in the process. We are going to have to come completely out of hiding from anything. People sometimes ask me, “Well, Adya, what does this actually mean? What should I be doing?” And I say, start with something very simple. Stop avoiding things. If there is anything that is unresolved in yourself, turn toward it. Face it. Look at it. Stop avoiding it. Stop moving the other way. Stop using a moment of awakening as a means to not deal…
We need to want the truth even more than we want to experience the truth. This sincerity isn’t something we can impose; it’s…
CHAPTER FOUR We Come to Nirvana by Way of Samsara
I remember someone asking one of my favorite Indian sages—Nisargadatta Maharaj—whether the egoic personality ever arose in him. He said, very casually, “Of course it does, but I see at once that it is illusion and I discard it.” This was a wonderful thing to hear—that even someone of the spiritual stature of Nisargadatta was saying that there is always a possibility that an old conditioned tendency can arise. He simply recognized it as illusory at the moment of its arising, and in that seeing, it was cast aside. It dissolved.
For him, a thought pattern arose, its illusory nature was revealed immediately and spontaneously, and it dissolved very quickly. But most people don’t start out that way, not even after a very profound awakening.
This sometimes comes as a surprise to people. Part of what happens when we awaken is that the top gets ripped off of our ability to suppress, and we find it very hard to hold anything at bay. In the aftermath of an awakening, some very powerful thought forms may arise—things we pushed down very deeply, that we tried to keep unconscious. But now everything starts to come into the light of being. It is not at all uncommon…
Freedom through Inquiry At these times, what’s important is to avoid what I call spiritual bypassing—dismissing the thought, ignoring the fact that we got caught in a moment of reidentification. We often use nondual language to this end. We tell ourselves, “Oh, that’s just identification. It doesn’t matter, since there’s nobody to do anything anyway. Everything’s happening spontaneously, after all.” This is a subtle yet effective way of hiding from our own experience. It allows us to avoid dealing with our continuing…
There are many ways to engage in self-inquiry. I found writing to be helpful to me, both before awakening and for a certain period of time afterward. If I noticed myself slipping back into identification, I would go to a coffee shop with a pad of paper and a pencil, and I would start to write about it. Writing about what happened actually helped me enter into the thought pattern that had triggered the reidentification. I…
example, if we do something that makes us feel silly or embarrassed, our mind might have the thought, “I shouldn’t have done that,” or “That was stupid of me.” If you take a thought that small and you start to really open it, you’ll see right away that thought…
When we inquire, it is important that we are using both body and mind; both feeling and thought. We must see which thoughts generate which feelings, and which thoughts are generated from feelings. It is a cycle: a thought creates a feeling, and that feeling creates the next thought—which then creates the next feeling. When I would go to the coffee shop with a pad of paper and a pencil, I would get very specific about exactly what the thought was that caused that moment of reidentification, and I would start to write about it. I would look at exactly how that thought viewed the world. To do that, I would have to enter into how I felt. I would have to zero in on what believing that…
The next step would be to ask myself about the belief pattern of the feeling. How does this feeling see the world? How does this feeling see self? What’s the worldview? What I started to see was that each thought and feeling contained a world in and of itself, a whole belief structure. Through a willingness to enter into the feeling, I discovered that the feeling had a voice. I…
You can’t just think about it; you can’t say, “This is a thought; I know it’s not true,” and be done with it. I would sometimes spend hours in the coffee shop, refusing to leave until I had gotten to the bottom of one single thought pattern. I knew that if that thought could hook me into reidentification, then another thought could hook me…
pulled forcibly out of heaven, back into hell. When you feel like you’re in hell, you’ll do anything you can to release yourself. So I would apply this inquiry process with great diligence. I would stick with it until I saw all the way through a moment of identification. I would know that I had gotten there when it completely released from my system. I had to revisit certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and reaction on several different occasions. Each time the process of insight would go deeper, revealing more and more. As it did, I would get down to the core beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. What was required was a willingness to stick with the inquiry so that the illusion could be pulled up by its root. It’s like weeding your yard. When I weed my yard, I’m embarrassed to say I tend to pull all the weeds out by the top. My wife, on the other hand, is a little more patient. When she weeds, she pulls things out by the root. You know she’s done the weeding, because the weeds don’t grow back for a few months. When I do the yard work, there are new weeds the next week. Fortunately, I didn’t do that in my own inner life. In the process of inquiry I’m describing, I found myself very focused. I was willing to go very deep, all the way to the root of whichever thought was causing a painful reaction.
Maybe writing will help you; maybe investigating your thought patterns in a meditative way will help you. Ultimately what’s important is to go to the heart of the thinking and feeling process. Only then can we find the illusory beliefs that are creating pain in the present moment. Most of us have had difficult moments in our lives, and in those times we’ve developed spontaneous coping strategies. When we are young and an event happens that causes us more pain than we are able to face head on, we come up with a belief that allows us to survive the situation. Maybe a child’s parents are dysfunctional. It’s too much for the child to face the fact that his parents are not capable of taking care of him particularly well.
Instead of seeing that his parents are dysfunctional, he might form a belief pattern that there is something wrong with him. At these kinds of moments, forming a belief pattern helps us cope and get through difficult times. We start this pattern in childhood, but it can continue into later life as well. When we sincerely inquire into these belief patterns, we find that they are no longer useful strategies. While they may have helped us cope with difficult situations in the past, they have outworn their usefulness. Thought itself is not a useful strategy. Telling ourselves any story about any event will always cause…
When these Velcro thoughts and emotions arise, the key is to face and investigate whatever belief structures underlie them. In that moment, inquiry is your spiritual practice. To avoid this practice is to avoid your own awakening. Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over…
Again, the only way to know that we’ve seen into the true nature of something is that the story we’re telling ourselves releases. It is not only seen to be illusion; it is felt to be illusion. I often tell students to stick with it until it falls away. The choice is between meditative inquiry and becoming a victim. That’s the choice you…
Through inquiry we come to see that all beliefs are of equal value. What I think somebody should have done or shouldn’t have done has no value. What they actually did is of…
They’re both either real or not real. When we see this, there’s an internal balancing of the opposites, and thought is no longer polarized. Only when thought is balanced in this way does the dualistic…
There is no such thing as past awakening; past awakening is past. The only thing that is relevant is the present. Am I awake to the truth right now, and not only in my mind, but in the entirety of my being? Do I actually see that the entire structure of a personal worldview and a personal…
We don’t come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don’t come to heaven by avoiding hell or trying to sidestep it. We don’t come to clarity by avoiding confusion. We don’t come to freedom by avoiding that which is less than freedom. The truth is quite the opposite. Our illusions—the beliefs we hold on to—are the very doorways to our freedom. We simply have to enter through them, without grasping or pushing away. We must not believe them, but we must not run from them, either.
Each moment is the moment that needs to be happening. Each experience we have is the divine invitation. It may be a beautifully engraved invitation, or it may be a very fierce invitation, but each moment is the invitation. I couldn’t possibly emphasize this more: the texture and flow of our lives, from moment to moment, is itself what reveals freedom. Life itself shows us what we need to see through in order to be free. So it is necessary that we don’t run from life, that we actually face what’s happening in an honest and sustained way. When we do this, we come to see that we truly do come to nirvana by way of samsara.
As time goes on, however, it becomes more and more natural, more and more spontaneous. At a certain point, this seeing and releasing becomes so internalized that it’s almost automatic. A thought arises, and there may be an instant of identification. Inquiry meets the thought, and it opens itself to freedom. Once this inward releasing is deeply internalized, the whole process can take a split second. That’s the way awakening moves. At times, we don’t even know it’s happening. But it is happening: Awareness is freeing itself, over and over and over. And as I have said, the key is sincerity. It’s the willingness to meet, sincerely and honestly, what is happening in our body and mind. That is always the doorway to freedom—a freedom that only happens now and now and now and now.
CHAPTER FIVE Coming Completely Out of Hiding
“I would tell the truth, and then I would allow my wife to tell truth. Then I would tell truth, and then allow her to tell truth.” He said it wasn’t that they were working anything out or trying to come to conclusions; they were simply coming out of hiding. They literally talked from eleven o’clock at night to three o’clock in the morning (which, he also said, was the reason he was kind of blurry and tired at the moment!).
He finished by saying that it was the most extraordinary evening of his entire life: just that evening of telling truth. Not asserting truth and not denying truth, just simply telling it in a very sincere way, coming completely out of hiding. I have found over the years of working with people, even people who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest—not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually totally truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody. We can not control somebody with whom we have been truthful. We can only control people if we tell half-truths, if we shave down what is true. When we tell the total truth, our inside is suddenly on the outside. There’s nothing hidden anymore. For most human beings, being that exposed brings up incredible fear. Most people walk around thinking, “My god, if anybody could look inside of me, if anybody could see what is happening in there, what my fears are, what my doubts are, what my truths are, what I really perceive, they would be horrified.” Most people are protecting themselves. They are holding a lot of things in. They are not living honest, truthful, and sincere lives, because if they were to do so, they would have no control. Of course, they don’t have control anyway, but they would have no illusion of control, either.
Most people don’t get out of childhood without having many experiences of being wounded for telling the truth. Someone said, “You can’t say that,” or “You shouldn’t say that,” or “That wasn’t appropriate.” As a result, most of us have very deep underlying conditioning that being just who we are is not okay. We have been conditioned to believe that there are times when it is okay to be truthful and honest, and there are times when it is not okay to be truthful and honest.
Most human beings actually have an imprinting—not only in their minds, but in their bodies and their emotions—that if they are honest, if they are real, something bad is going to happen. Somebody is not going to like it. They won’t be able to control their environment if they tell the truth.
Truth is a very high standard. Truth is not a plaything. To tell what is true within ourselves is not to tell what we think; it is not to tell our opinion. It is not to dump the garbage can of our mind onto somebody else. All of that is illusion, distortion, projection. Truth is not unloading our opinions onto someone. That is not truth. Truth is not telling our beliefs about things. That is not truth. Those are ways that we actually hide from truth. Truth is much more intimate than that. When we tell the truth, it has the sense of a confession. I don’t mean a confession of something bad or wrong, but I mean the sense where we come completely out of hiding. Truth is a simple thing. To speak the truth is to speak from a sense of total and absolute unprotectedness.
True Freedom Is a Gift to Everybody and Everything
True freedom isn’t simply “I’m free.” True freedom is “Everything is free.” This means everybody has the freedom to be who they are—whether they are awake or not awake, deluded or not deluded. Freedom is the realization that everything and everybody gets to be exactly as they are. Unless we’ve come to that point, unless we’ve seen that this is how reality sees things, then we’re actually withholding freedom from the world.
The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.
We cannot be true as long as we are expecting or wanting others to agree with us. That will cause us to contract—maybe they won’t like what I say; maybe they won’t agree; maybe they won’t like me. When we are protecting ourselves, we are also withholding freedom from everybody else. When we realize that we are the one and only Spirit that manifests as everything and everyone, in the very nature of that realization is total freedom for all. There is a certain fearlessness in this realization. People sometimes come to me and say, “Well, Adya, there’s still some inner place”—and, I find, it’s often a very early childhood place—“that’s afraid to just be what I know to be true.” And, of course, I’ll say, “You have to look at it, to see how you, yourself, formed certain belief structures based on what happened in the past. You have to look into it and see if those belief structures are really true.” But also, we need to recognize that we have no way of knowing or predicting how the world will receive us. Part of being awake is being willing to be crucified. If we think that to be awake means the whole world will agree with us, then we are in a total delusion. Jesus found that out. Here was an awakened being—the son of God, as they say in Christianity. And what happened to the son of God? He got crucified for expressing what he knew to be true.
In fact, many times the dream state feels offended and threatened by true enlightenment, because a truly enlightened being cannot be controlled. Even the threat of death cannot control an enlightened being. The threat of death could not control Jesus. He was going to live his life…
Thus, as a human being, we can’t have these childish ideas that enlightenment means “everybody loves me.” Maybe everybody will love you, but more likely some will and some won’t. But when you have given the whole world its freedom, then you have gone a long way toward…
Sincerity Is the Key The most important thing is not that you try to convince anybody of the truth that you see. What is really important is that you are truthful with yourself. If you can be truthful with yourself, then you can be truthful with anybody. There is no real usefulness in becoming overly focused on being truthful with everybody else. Although that’s necessary, the place to start is with yourself—can you be totally sincere with yourself? Can you go to that place that is beyond blame, beyond judgment, beyond should and shouldn’t? Can you go to that place that is so sincere you won’t shy…
Coming completely out of hiding, being willing to see every point of fixation, every way you go into division, enables this part of the journey to continue. As this happens, you feel your heart opening, your mind opening; you feel yourself opening on levels that you never dreamed possible. These levels are not just transcendent of humanness, but also right within your humanness, because there is no separation between your human being and your divine being.
Sincerity is the key. You have to be willing; you have to want to see everything. When you want to see everything, you will see everything.
Transcendence as Avoidance A lot of students who come to see me have the unconscious idea that enlightenment means one should be able to feel complete happiness, total bliss, and total freedom in any situation. This is one of the unconscious beliefs that many people have about awakening, and it’s another misperception. It is true that, after awakening, the exterior situations and circumstances of life stop having such an ability to throw us off center. But it’s also true that, when we awaken, we start to become more conscious of the patterns of behavior in our lives that are not in harmony with what we have realized.
I have found that a lot of people become quite afraid when they start to realize where this whole movement of awakening is taking them, that it is taking them into an area where they will be called to be unusually honest and real and come completely out of hiding. This is contrary to the idea of awakening being simply a transcendence of life, the finding of a safe haven in some inner experience where we don’t have to deal with life as it is. Awakening is, in fact, quite the opposite: it’s a state of being in which we find the capacity to deal with our lives as they actually are. But as I said, many people are afraid of this part of the process, because it demands that we come out of hiding on every level. A lot of people are afraid to let truth penetrate certain relationships they may be in—be they family or
friendships or love relationships or marriages. It can be much more comfortable to hide from the truth, to hide from certain patterns of dysfunction that may be present.
In relationship, you have to have a willingness to not stay hidden away in a transcendent state. You have to come out of it, as it were, and deal with people and situations. This student was starting to hide within his realization. He was starting to not deal with things that were unpleasant or difficult. He was using his realization as a reason to avoid dealing with them. His teacher spotted this and was wise enough to put him in a situation where he was forced to deal with his wife, with his situation, with his relationship. He couldn’t just hide out in a transcendent state. Ultimately, we find that enlightenment—if it’s true and real—does not allow us to avoid anything. In fact, the enlightened perspective actually makes it quite difficult, and ultimately impossible, to turn away from any part of our life.
And of course, most human beings are afraid of change. We may want change, but change always has a quality of unknowingness; you never know how something is going to turn out. But this is an important part of becoming fully awake; we have to come fully out of hiding.
I constantly tell people that enlightenment is no guarantee that your life is going to go the way you planned. Life will be much better than it was, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to go the way you want it to. In the end, it’s about truth; it is about being truthful in all aspects, at all levels of our being.
In the ultimate view of things, it’s the relationship of the One with the One, of Spirit with Spirit. Then there is the appearance of this relationship—the dance of relationship, the dance of life. And in this dance, it is absolutely essential that we not hide from anything.
Awakening can be the ground from which we meet every person and situation. It can be the ground from which we relate to all the circumstances of life. But this takes a lot of courage and a lot of fearlessness. It also takes something I continue to emphasize: a very simple sincerity. This kind of sincerity arises from that which loves the truth and sees that the truth is the greatest good. To be anything less than real, to be in avoidance of anything at all, diminishes our experience of who we are. As I often say to my students, to be less than truthful with the people and situations in your life is to withhold the expression of who you are.
Awakening calls forth a transformation in both our interior and exterior lives. Again, please don’t think this transformation is about having the perfect life or the perfect job or the perfect mate or the perfect marriage or the perfect friendship. This is not about perfection; it is about wholeness. It is not about having things exactly as we want them, but about having things exactly as they are. When we allow things to be, a sense of harmony develops; the gap between our realization and who we are as a human being gets smaller and smaller. A seamless continuum begins to emerge between realization and expression, awakening and its actualization.
CHAPTER SIX Common Delusions, Traps, and…
from nonabiding awakening to abiding awakening. Part of this transition process can include the arising of certain delusions, where the ego grasps at awakening. It grasps at the realizations inherent within awakening, almost as if it were grasping the raw…
Getting Stuck in a Sense of…
But after awakening, the egoic mind can come in and start to feel a personal sense of betterment, as if awakening made oneself better than another. This is very common;…
Because we have awakened, we are always right. At this point, the ego—which is the constructor of the dream state—can take that perception and start to create what I call an enlightened ego. There’…
ego that thinks it is awake, an ego that is using some of the energy and realization of awakening to construct a new and superior sense of self. I’ve seen people who have had an authentic moment of awakening use their realization…
I’ve had people say to me, “But Adya, there is no ego; there is no ‘me.’ Since there’s no ‘me,’ there’s nothing to do.” And I’ll say, “Yes, but have you noticed that you have an incredible capacity to act like a jerk sometimes?” And they’ll say, “Well, that may be true, but there’s nobody here to do anything about it. It’s all spontaneously unfolding. To think that I should address it in any way is just more dream-state delusion.” It’s hard to get…
This is very common in spirituality. It is very common for the ego to say to itself, “Oh, I have awakened, and I’ve seen that everything is spontaneous. Therefore, I’m not responsible for anything that happens. If you don’t like it, sorry for you; you just haven’t seen the ultimate nature of reality.” This is a type of egoic delusion, based on superiority. As I’ve said, this delusion is very common, and it’s why I emphasize that on the journey from nonabiding to abiding awakening, our greatest ally is a deep and profound sense of sincerity. With sincerity, we’re able to recognize that this superiority is a form of arrogance, a way the mind is using insight to hide.
What I have seen in my years of teaching is that often people who have this overt sense of superiority want to make sure other people hear them and know what they know. They want to make sure that people agree with them or, more important, that people know that they are enlightened. I’ve had people literally jump up onto the stage when I’m teaching and grab a microphone and start to tell the audience their version of what the truth is. In such moments, I have the sense that I probably can’t get through to these people. Given enough time, however, life will get through to them. The beauty is that when we are functioning from a place that is less than true, it won’t ultimately work for us in life. It will break down at some point. We will be brought to our knees in one way or another. Ultimately, we will encounter ourselves. There is no such thing as deluding ourselves permanently; life doesn’t work that way.
It is also important to know that after awakening, some amount of this superiority is normal. In Zen we have a phrase for it: “drunk on emptiness.” It means being a bit drunk on the inherent energy and beauty of awakening itself.