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

by Adyashanti

“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.

Every time we reidentify with conditioning or karma, every time we believe a thought, we are putting energy back into the dream state, putting our foot back on that accelerator.

Even though it’s not personal—even though reidentification is totally spontaneous and it’s not happening to anybody and it’s not anybody’s fault—we still need to investigate how it happens.

In this, life itself is your greatest ally.

life is where the spiritual rubber hits the road. Life will show us w...

We are going to come out of hiding. We are not going to grab on to anything.

This is about seeing what causes division within oneself.

What is truly holy is perceiving from wholeness. which means not being divided inside.

there is a strong tendency in the egoic structure to use awakening as a reason to hide from all of one’s inner divisions.

an important part of this phase of the journey is the willingness, the sincere commitment, to be very honest with oneself.

Reality is speaking to reality.

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 doesn’t even perceive delusion or the dream state as separate or other than itself. It sees that everything is itself, equally itself.

The truth of our being is not content until it has freed itself of its own misunderstanding, its own fixations, its own illusions.

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 doesn’t move away from pain, but quite the opposite. It moves toward it.

The truly enlightened beings are often those who dedicate their lives completely to the welfare of others.

Without denying the absolute view of perfection, they are open to perceiving something more. They are open to perceiving the inherent compassion of reality itself.

Reality is in the process of awakening all of itself to itself.

Our humanness is also divine, and our humanness seeks to be penetrated through and through with truth and reality.

This is very different from a therapeutic approach. We aren’t investigating ourselves to try to fix everything in order to be happy.

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.

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 with something that may be less than awake within you.

The technique is sincerity; we need to really want the truth.

This sincerity isn’t something we can impose; it’s inherent within reality itself.

This can be very surprising, not only for the people it’s happening within, but for those around them. One minute, such a person could be extraordinarily wise, and the next minute he or she might be extraordinarily deluded.

“Velcro” thoughts—they are those spontaneous thoughts that occur in given situations that hook us. This type of thought causes an almost immediate reidentification with the thinking pattern.

It is true that the more spiritual awakening matures in us, the more we see through; there is less and less tendency to get caught by thought.

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.”

In fact, it’s not at all uncommon for some of the deepest and most contracted thought patterns to arise just after 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,

It is not at all uncommon for us to find that certain thoughts have the power to Velcro us into a temporary state of identification.

There are many ways to engage in self-inquiry. I

For 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 and feeling are linked; one is actually the doorway into the other. The thought, “I shouldn’t have done that,” comes with a feeling—perhaps the feeling of embarrassment or anger. In this we see the inner worldview of the thought, and how it pulls us into identification.

The problem is, the mental level is often disconnected from the emotional level.

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.

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 particular thought—be it condemnation or embarrassment or what have you—generated at the feeling level. Then I would enter into the feeling and allow myself to feel the feeling. 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.

the feeling had ...

I would sometimes spend hours in the coffee shop, refusing to leave until I had gotten to the bottom of one single thought pattern.

The more awake we become, the more that reidentification hurts. It’s like being 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 relea...

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.

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.

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.

When we sincerely inquire into these belief patterns, we find that they are no longer useful strategies.

Ultimately, any formulation we make in our minds about the past or the present will be in conflict with life as it is, with what is actually happening.

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, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.