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

by Adyashanti

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 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.

Of course, 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.

We can not control somebody with whom we have been truthful. We can only control people if we tell half-truths...

When we tell the total truth, our inside is suddenl...

Most people are protecting themselves. They are holding a lot of things in. They are not living honest, truthful, and sincere lives, because if they were to do so, they would have no control.

Most people don’t get out of childhood without having many experiences of being wounded for telling the truth. Someone said, “You can’t say that,” or “You shouldn’t say that,” or “That wasn’t appropriate.” As a result, most of us have very deep underlying conditioning that being just who we are is not okay.

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.

Truth is much more intimate than that. When we tell the truth, it has the sense of a confession. I don’t mean a confession of something bad or wrong, but I mean the sense where we come completely out of hiding. Truth is a simple thing. To speak the truth is to speak from a sense of total and absolute unprotectedness.

Part of awakening, if it is true and authentic, is the gift of freedom to the whole world.

Freedom is the realization that everything and everybody gets to be exactly as they are.

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.

We cannot be true as long as we are expecting or wanting others to agree with us.

But also, we need to recognize that we have no way of knowing or predicting how the world will receive us. Part of being awake is being willing to be crucified. If we think that to be awake means the whole world will agree with us, then we are in a total delusion.

Thus, as a human being, we can’t have these childish ideas that enlightenment means “everybody loves me.” Maybe everybody will love you, but more likely some will and some won’t. But when you have given the whole world its freedom, then you have gone a long way toward finding your own freedom. They are tied inextricably, one to the other.

Although that’s necessary, the place to start is with yourself—can you be totally sincere with yourself? Can you go to that place that is beyond blame, beyond judgment, beyond should and shouldn’t?

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

I’m simply saying that awakened consciousness moves in particular ways. It does not deny anything. It does not hide; it is not avoiding any part of life.

This is not about perfection; it is about wholeness. It is not about having things exactly as we want them, but about having things exactly as they are.

One of the most common delusions after awakening is the delusion of superiority.

Inherent in this delusion is the sense that we know something. Because we have awakened, we know. Because we have awakened, we’re right.

There’s nothing more distasteful than an enlightened ego.

When we are in a true state of awakedness, we never use what we have realized as a way to hide from anything within ourselves. We welcome everything into the light of being.

As I said earlier, the absolute view of things is true. There is no separate doer; the ego is an illusion. Ultimately, there is no separate entity to do anything, and everything does happen spontaneously. But there is a deeper truth. The problem with this deeper truth is that it’s very hard to put into words.

There is no birth, no old age, and no death. This is true from the absolute point of view.

is very common for the ego to say to itself, “Oh, I have awakened, and I’ve seen that everything is spontaneous. Therefore, I’m not responsible for anything that happens. If you don’t like it, sorry for you; you just haven’t seen the ultimate nature of reality.”

Each of us has to look and see if we feel any sense of inflation, any sense of superiority, any sense of looking down our noses at anybody we think is not awake.

The key to unraveling any delusion, to seeing through anything that separates us, is to uncover its genesis.

One of the most common of these traps is a sense of meaninglessness. From our new view of reality, we are free from the egoic desire to find meaning. We see that the ego’s desire to find meaning in life is actually a substitute for the perception of being life itself. The search for meaning in life is a surrogate for the knowledge that we are life. Only someone who is disconnected from life itself will seek meaning. Only someone disconnected from life will look for purpose.

But as I have said over and over, after awakening there is still a human being with a human mind that is trying to make sense of things. The mind is even trying to make sense of awakening itself.

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. One has actually awakened as the very essence of existence itself. What could have more meaning than that? What could have more purpose than that?

Being stuck in emptiness is a form of being stuck in the transcendent, being stuck in the position of the witness.

position of the witness.

The ego can set up camp anywhere; it is a shape-shifter. If superiority doesn’t work, meaninglessness might; if meaninglessness doesn’t work, then setting up camp as the disconnected witness might.

The first insight, that “the world is illusion,” is not a philosophical statement. Seeing that the world is illusion is part of the awakening experience. It is something that is known; we discover that there is no such thing as an objective world out there, separate from us.

In the statement, “The world is Brahman,” we have the realization of true oneness. “The world is Brahman” collapses the position of the external witness. The witness position collapses into the totality, and suddenly we’re not witnessing from the outside anymore.

To be truly awake, to be enlightened, is to be free of all grasping—to be free of all points of view. That state is literally indescribable.

But the illusion that the witness was different from what was being witnessed remained. For me, as for many people, the next phase of the journey of awakening was the collapsing of the witness position. It starts to collapse when we see that if witnessing is different from the witness, then there is an inherent division.

A whole other perception unfolds when we stop fixating egoically—when the ego stops trying to re-create itself as an “enlightened ego,” when it stops looking at the nature of reality and drawing false conclusions. When through investigation, meditation, and deep looking these delusions start to die, then a whole new area of our spiritual life begins to open up.

But I want to describe something else that is not often addressed in spiritual discussions: How life itself, everyday life, can be our most valuable teacher.

I had a tremendous amount of identity built around this kind of dominance.

During these illnesses, that identity was being wiped out.

I realized that I was no longer an athlete. I no longer met the criteria to consider myself an athlete—I was not physically strong, I didn’t have great endurance, and I was no longer a great competitor. The persona of “the athlete” no longer belonged to me.

So once I was well again, I started to see my illness as a true gift, a form of grace. It literally reduced me to something as weak as a puppy, and in the process offered me relief from that egoic mandate to be an athlete. It was the relief of being literally nobody.

It was a great joy to ride my bike again—through the forest, through the mountains, around where I lived. It was even more enjoyable than it had been before, because there was the joy of the activity itself combined with the fact that I didn’t have to be competitive anymore. I didn’t have to be physically dominant; I could simply ride.

I would actually say to myself, “I know that the only reason I’m training is so I can put my egoic personality structure back together.”

The irony is that most human beings spend their lives avoiding painful situations. Not that we are successful, but we are always trying to avoid pain.

We may, indeed, make great leaps in consciousness through beautiful moments, but I’d say that most people make their greatest leaps in consciousness in the difficult times.

What you have to be willing to do is to encounter yourself and to face your own uncertainty. But how many of us want to let go into uncertainty, into the unknown, into the uncontrollable?