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

by Adyashanti

is a myth that spiritual awakening is a rare phenomenon available only to a select few—such

“spiritual awakening”—an unshakable realization that who we are is the oneness of life—as the most important transformation of their lives.

what troubles me the most is the number of people who deny anything in their experience—be it anger, depression, or family trouble—that contradicts their idea of what it means to be an awakened person.

there are very few resources available for people who have had an initial experience of spiritual awakening and want to understand how the process continues and unfolds.

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.

Spiritual awakening reveals that that which is unspeakable and unexplainable is actually what we are.

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.

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.

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.

It is not possible to imagine something outside of the dream state when our consciousness is still within it.

disorientation.

Only a few people in a given generation may wake up in such a way that there’s no further process to undergo.

As my teacher used to say, it’s like getting your foot in the front door. Just because you’ve gotten your foot in the front door doesn’t mean you have turned the lights on; it doesn’t mean you have learned to navigate in that different world that you’ve awakened to.

happens after awakening.

this book is meant to be a welcoming to that new world, that new state of oneness.

after awakening, the process is happening from a different perspective;

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.

we do not become immune to misperception simply because we’ve had a ...

The path after awakening, then, is a path of dissolving our remaining fixations—our

dissolving certain delusions we have, certain tendencies to contract.

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.

before awakening we are doing it from the perspective of separation, and after awakening we are doing it from the perspective of nonseparation.

trying to put the truth into words is a fool’s game.

the approach we often take before awakening—we conceptualize the truth and then believe the concept.

Don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself. Even

everything I am teaching must be awakened to. It must be lived for it to be real.

“Do I really know what I think I know, or have I just taken on the beliefs and opinions of others? What do I actually know. and what do I want to believe or imagine? What do I know for certain?”

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.

when we are willing to stand as if facing an oncoming wind and not wince—we can finally face our actual self.

“What do I know for certain?” is also an invaluable tool once awakening has happened. Asking yourself this question aids in the dissolution of limitations and ideas, as well as the tendency to fixate—all of which continue after awakening.

it’s this willingness to stand up within yourself and ask this question, and to be open and sincere about what you find,...

As long as we are chasing the by-products of awakening, we will miss the real thing.

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.

As a teacher, one of the things that I find out about students relatively early on is whether they are interested in the real thing—do they really want the truth, or do they actually just want to feel better?

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.

trying to feel better in the moment is exactly how we delude ourselves.

We might expect an experience akin to union with God: a merging with the environment or a dissolving into the ocean. This is not the case.

spiritual awakening is very different from having a mystical experience.

mystical experiences are not the same as awakening.

in the relative world of things, mystical experiences have a value.

when we are talking about spiritual awakening, we are not talking about personal experience. We are talking about awakening from the “me.”

We see the chair, and at the same time we do not see ourselves as separate from the chair. Everything we see, everything we feel, everything we hear is literally a manifestation of the same thing.

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.

If, on the other hand, the awakening is of a nonabiding character, then the seeker and seeking may be in the process of being dissolved, but may not be entirely dissolved yet.

For those of us on a spiritual path, our whole identity may have been wrapped up in being the seeker. Life may have literally been defined by spiritual seeking, by the yearning for God or union or enlightenment.

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 ...

Awakening is sort of like your first spiritual kiss, your first real kiss of reality, your introduction to the truth of who and what you are.

In the deepest sense, this honeymoon is an experience of complete and utter nonresistance.

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!