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

by Adyashanti

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 hav...

done. Only when we see that our thoughts, judgments, and opinions are just as true as their opposites are the polarities of thought balanced.

This is not something that we see once; it is something that we see any and every time it is necessary to see it. 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 self is nothing but a dream in universal mind? This is all that is relevant.

We must be willing to see that we are believing something; that somewhere, we’re grasping.

Our illusions—the beliefs we hold on to—are the very doorways to our freedom.

We need to see each moment of apparent bondage as an invitation to freedom. Then it becomes an act of love, an act of compassion, to stop running away.

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. This doesn’t mean we stay stuck in samsara. Instead, we unhook ourselves from it. We un-Vel...

Awakening reveals our already perfect inh...

Over time, this seeing and releasing becomes natural; it becomes spontaneous. At the beginning, it may be somewhat tedious.

It may take quite a bit of time and intention, maybe even some real effort and discipline. 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...

Once this inward releasing is deeply internalized, the whole process can take a split second. That’s

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 freed...

I asked the audience to consider with me the following kinds of questions: What would it be like if we didn’t avoid anything we knew to be true? What if we came out of hiding in all areas of our life? What if we completely stopped avoiding ourselves, because that literally is the awakened life?

“My wife and I have been on the edge of a divorce for quite some time now. When we went home after we heard your talk, we just sat down and started to tell each other the truth. We started to tell each other what was true for ourselves.”

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!).

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.

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.

They had the honesty to know that they had made a beginning by telling each other the truth, by being honest, by being real, but they weren’t trying to control the outcome.

We must be able to manifest what we realize, and we must also come to grips with and start to notice the very forces within us that keep us from manifesting truthfulness in every situation.

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.

When we tell the truth, it has the sense of a confession.

To speak the truth is to speak from a sense of total and absolute unprotectedness.

What are the exact belief structures that cause you to go into duality, that cause you to go into conflict and hiding? Only then can you tell truth in the way I’m discussing here.

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.

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.

Again, if we were fully awake, it would be impossible to miss this, but most people do not awaken all at once.

Only when everyone is allowed to be as they are—when you have given them that freedom, the freedom they already possess—do you find within yourself th...

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 our...

When we realize that we are the one and only Spirit that manifests as everything and everyone, in the very nature of that re...

“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.”

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.

We have a long history in many societies of getting rid of or killing truly enlightened beings, because true enlightenment does not conform to the dream state.

a truly enlightened being cannot be controlled.

But when you have given the whole world its freedom, then you have gone a long way toward finding your own freedom.

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.

Can you go to that place that is so sincere you won’t shy away from any part of yourself that is still in conflict;

sincerity and honesty are manifestations of the absolute nature of being.

Nonetheless, this is where awakening moves; awakening moves toward and into that which is not awake.

our human nature and our divine nature are one—one being, one expression, one truth.

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.

If you believe the misperception that enlightenment is only about happiness, bliss, and freedom, you will be motivated to transcend or escape those areas of your life that feel less than fully functional.

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

Awakening is, in fact, quite the opposite: it’s a state of being in which we find the capacity to deal with ...

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.

if we do not face ourselves, we can actually stall our spiritual unfolding.

one of the dangers of awakening—that one can start to divorce oneself from the grittiness of life and the grittiness of relationship.