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

by Adyashanti

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.

You need to be willing to question everything, to stop and ask yourself, “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?”

We must give up the pursuit of positive emotional states through spiritual practice. The path of awakening is not about positive emotions. On the contrary, enlightenment may not be easy or positive at all. It is not easy to have our illusions crushed. It is not easy to let go of long-held perceptions. We may experience great resistance to seeing through even those illusions that cause us a great amount of pain.

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.

Another one of the great misunderstandings about awakening or enlightenment is that it is some sort of mystical experience.

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.

This dropping away of the seeker can be experienced as a huge relief. It marks what I like to call the honeymoon of awakening.

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.

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 right job? Can I find the right lover? Will I get enlightened?”

The dream state is the state where we perceive separation, where we think we are a separate entity and a separate being.

There is still a human being there; we don’t disappear into a puff of smoke. Even our personality remains intact.

The difference is that once we have seen beyond the veil of separation, identification with our particular personality begins to dissolve.

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.

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.

it’s not the “me” who has awakened. Awakedness woke up from the “me.”

it’s enlightenment that is enlightened. It is not the “me” that is enlightened. It is not the person that is enlightened. It is enlightenment that is enlightened.

Before we awakened, we either believed a thought or we didn’t believe a thought; that’s all we knew. It was one or the other. But after a glimpse of awakening, things can become very strange. We may believe a thought and not believe a thought simultaneously, or we may act in a way that we know is not coming from the undivided vision that we have seen.

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.

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 much more nuanced than that. It is not a personal thing; it is not an acquisition for us.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

When we awaken, we are no longer fueling the trance of separation; we are no longer pumping energy into it.

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 back into the dream state, putting our foot back on that accelerator.

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.

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.

It can be very difficult for any spiritual teacher to get through to students like this, to get them to stop holding on to their fixation on an absolute view.

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 seeks to be penetrated through and through with truth and reality.

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 fact is, we can have a very deep seeing of the true nature of things, while remaining, on the human level, very conflicted and deluded in certain areas of our lives.

There are certain thoughts that continue to arise. I call them “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.

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.”

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

What is important is to have the willingness to look at these moments of identification clearly and honestly.

It is a cycle: a thought creates a feeling, and that feeling creates the next thought—which then creates the next feeling.

I would look at exactly how that thought viewed the world.

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?

Very often we find that the beliefs and ideas contained in our thinking and feeling come from our childhood.

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.

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 these Velcro thoughts and emotions arise, the key is to face and investigate whatever belief structures underlie them.

The choice is between meditative inquiry and becoming a victim. 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.

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

If an opinion that is different from mine has just as much right to exist as mine does, then it’s impossible to say which opinion is real or true. They’re both either real or not real.

My teacher told me that we come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to the truth, to freedom, by the way of bondage. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things.

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....