The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

by Adyashanti

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 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 of separation about it, if you go into judgment, if you 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.

Once there is the perception, from the awakened state, of one’s own karma being impersonal—not having to do with any self, any body, any person—one’s situation is much more workable.

Telling ourselves any story about any event will always cause pain.

That’s the choice you have—to be a victim to your own ideas and beliefs, or to feel into them until they drop away.

What I think somebody should have done or shouldn’t have done has no value. What they actually did is of equal value to what I think they should have done.

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.

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.

Inside human consciousness there is a deep taboo that says it is not okay to realize the truth of being.

The search for meaning in life is a surrogate for the knowledge that we are life.

From an awakened point of view, to say there’s no meaning and no purpose is tremendously positive. And it is positive because one has found something better than meaning or purpose.

There is no such thing as an enlightened thought.

To be awake on the level of emotion, first and foremost, means to no longer be deriving a sense of self from how and what we feel.

Our emotional life reveals our unconscious intellectual life.

We may think, “So-and-so shouldn’t have said that to me.” But the reality is that they did.

Reality is simply what is. As soon as we have anything in us that judges it, that condemns it, that says it shouldn’t be, we will feel division.

We’re taught that we would be deluding ourselves if we didn’t go into division about certain things, about our own suffering or somebody else’s. It’s as if we wouldn’t really be a feeling person if we didn’t internally experience a certain divisiveness, given particular events.

we realize there isn’t a justified reason to argue with reality, because we’ll never win the fight.

Arguing with something doesn’t help us get beyond it;

An awakened being is a tremendously emotionally available being—someone who is not defending himself or herself on the emotional level or the intellectual level.

The very act of trying to get rid of something sustains it.

Only when you are willing to die for the sake of truth can that grasping truly and authentically let go.

You feel where events are moving, and you feel for the right thing to do.

“Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”

What do you actually know—whether you want to know it or not?”

spontaneous state of surrender—to letting go.

It’s necessary for us to be free of our need for freedom,

enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness.

Our greatest contribution to humanity is our awakening.

The kingdom of heaven is the natural state of being.

it suddenly hit me that I would never again see life as most human beings see it.