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

by Adyashanti

This isn’t a journey about becoming something. This is about unbecoming who we are not, about undeceiving ourselves.

Awakening is waking up from the person, yes, but it also has a profound impact on, and in many ways transforms, the person.

By energetic component, what I mean is that there is a profound realignment of the way our system works.

In many ways, it is only in retrospect that we come to understand that the dream state itself, the state of egoic separation, chews up a tremendous amount of energy. Only once it dissolves can we see the immense amount of energy required to continue the perception of separation that most of us live with. While we’re in it, we have no sense just how much energy is being spent on the dream of separation.

One of the most common things that happens as this energy starts to open up within us is insomnia—often our systems are not accustomed to the amount of raw energy coursing through. It is possible that, for quite a while after an awakening, you will find your system “revved up.”

there was some sort of a transformation that led to a new sense of clarity and focus. There was also a significant quieting of the mind.

We humans spend maybe 10 percent of our time thinking about things we really need to think about. We spend the other 90 percent of our time imagining, fantasizing, and becoming involved in all sorts of internal stories and dramas that have no basis in truth.

Many times when people say they haven’t slept well in six months, and I can tell they have anxiety around that fact, I ask them, “Do you really need more sleep than you’re getting? Do you actually know that you need to sleep more than you are? Or are you sitting there in bed at night telling yourself how tired you are going to be the next day?” It is amazing what happens when we let go of the thought patterns that say, “I should get more sleep,” when we realize that it’s just a thought.

Ultimately, what is most helpful is to keep the thinking process out of what is happening.

Nondivision is the effect of awakening; it is the expression of the realization of our true nature.

being undivided has nothing to do with being perfect or saintly. Also, there is no guarantee after awakening that, in any particular moment, you will not experience division in some way; there is no guarantee that division will never happen again. In fact, to be free, to be awakened, is to let go of concern with such things, with how awakened one is or isn’t.

the awakened state: “To be without anxiety abou...

One model that I have found useful in working with students is to consider how awakening impacts us on three different levels of our being: at the mental level (the level of the mind), at the emotional level (the level of the heart), and at the existential level (the level of the gut).

Please keep in mind that these three levels are metaphoric; this is just a tool to help make sense of something that people experience.

What does it mean to experience nondivision at the level of the mind? We all know what it is like to be divided on the level of mind, to have one thought in conflict with another, to have one part of the mind saying, “I should do this,” and another part of the mind saying, “I shouldn’t do that.”

To have a divided mind is to have a mind in conflict with itself.

But in the state of consciousness that most human beings are in, the mind is easily mistaken for something it’s not. The mind is not seen as a tool, but instead as the source of a sense of self.

But in human consciousness, the mind is not seen simply as a tool. What has happened instead is that the mind has usurped reality. It has become its own reality to such an extent that we human beings find our sense of self—who we think we are, our self-image—in our thinking process.

As the light of awakening starts to penetrate on the level of mind, we see that mind has no inherent reality to it.

A thought has no truthfulness to it. You can have the thought of a glass of water, but if you’re thirsty, you can’t drink the thought.

At best, thought is symbolic. It may point in the direction of a truth or an object, but many thoughts don’t even do that.

As we awaken on the level of mind, we begin to perceive from beyond the mind. We realize that the mind itself is empty of reality, and this is a profound realization.

When we see that the structure of thought holds no intrinsic reality, we come to see that the world as we perceive it, through the mind, can’t have any reality. This is earthshaking; the self that we perceive ourselves to be has no reality.

What is destroyed is our entire worldview—all the ways we are conditioned, all of our belief structures, all of the belief structures of humanity, from the present time to the distant past—all of them go into forming this particular world, this consensus that human beings have agreed upon, this viewing of things as true, literally down to “I’m a human being” or “There is such a thing as a world” or “The world needs to be a particular way.”

When we awaken at the level of the mind, we begin to think, “My goodness, the way I saw the world was a complete fabrication, literally the stuff of dreams.

Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true—from ourselves to the world.

In this process we discover that even the greatest inventions of the greatest minds in human history are but the dreams of children. We start to see that all the great philosophies and all the great philosophers are part of the dream. Awakening at the level of the mind is like pulling back the curtain, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

To be awake on the level of emotion, first and foremost, means to no longer be deriving a sense of self from how and what we feel.

Usually, someone’s sense of self is linked to and enmeshed with what they feel.

Awakening on the level of emotion means that we start to see and understand that what we feel does not

tell us who and what we are. It tells us what we feel, period.

Emotional turmoil tells us that we have an unconscious belief that isn’t true.

I am talking about dealing with the emotional body at a more fundamental level. I’m talking about inquiring into the nature of fear, the nature of anger. When we feel an emotional contraction, what is that contraction about?

Most of our emotions—especially so-called negative emotions—can be traced back to anger, fear, and judgment.

As soon as one feels emotional conflict, the questions that should be asked are: “In what way am I going into division? At this moment, what’s causing this sense of separation, isolation, or protectiveness? What is it that I’m believing? What assumptions have I made that are being reproduced in my body and made manifest as emotion?”

All of us grew up in a world where certain negative emotions were thought to be justified. The feeling of being a victim is a good example.

But when we look at this, we see that this is just a means by which we go into separation.

It is surprising indeed to realize that none of our arguments with what is, or with what was, have any basis in truth. Our arguments are just part of the dream state.

One can be sad without feeling divided. One can feel grief without being divided. One can feel a certain amount of anger without being divided.

The key is whether or not the emotion is being derived from divisiveness.

If we look deeply, we see that fear is the linchpin that holds our emotional sense of self intact. So why are we so afraid? Because we have this idea of who we are that is limited and separate. We have an image of ourselves as somebody who can be hurt or damaged or offended.

We have to see, through our own investigation, that this sense of self, this sense of separateness, is an illusion. It’s not true. It’s a little lie we

tell ours...

It is that little conclusion—that I am the person I imagine myself to be—that opens us up to fear. Because that person we imagine ourselves to be also imagines that it can be hurt at any moment, th...

Awakening on the level of emotion frees us from these fear-based fixations.

The ultimate nature of reality is indiscriminate; reality is what is. The truest sign of an awakened heart is that it is an indiscriminate lover of what is. This means it loves everything, because it sees everything as itself. This is the birth of unconditional love.

The third type of awakening is awakening at the level of the gut. The level of the gut is our most existential sense of self. It’s that part of ourselves where there is a core type of grasping—a grasping at our root.

Of course, growing up is traumatic to some degree for all of us. Even if you had a wonderful upbringing, the most lovely parents, and the most wonderful environment in the world, there’s no getting away without experiencing some level of trauma.

Awakening at the level of the gut requires facing and releasing our deepest existential fear. It also requires facing and releasing what I call personal will, or the part of us that says, “This is what I want and the way I want it to be.”

“Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”