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

by Adyashanti

Enlightenment is when everything within us is in cooperation with the flow of life itself, with the inevitable.

The type of teachings that say you must make a lot of effort often have little room for spontaneity and naturalness. The type of teachings that say everything is the will of God—that there is no part for you to play, so you might as well just relax and let it all happen—can become fixated on an absolute point of view that often neglects a greater

vision.

One of the things I realized, a long time ago, is that the truth never lies in any polarized statem...

Too many people abdicate responsibility for themselves. Too many people in spirituality want someone to tell them what to do. They want the teacher to say, “Do this or don’t do that. Meditate this much or meditate that much.”

We need the willingness to lose our world. That willingness is the surrender; that willingness is the letting go.

Yet there is indeed a trajectory to awakening; there is a maturing from awakening to what could be called enlightenment.

In a certain sense, enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness. We start to realize the ordinary is extraordinary.

What we see is the underlying perfection of life. It is from that groundwork of seeing, experiencing, and literally knowing the underlying perfection of life that we are moved by an entirely different force.

No longer are we pushed or pulled; no longer do we feel like we need to achieve. No longer do we feel like we need to be known or recognized or confirmed or loved or hated or liked or disliked. Those are simply states of consciousness within the dreaming mind.

But ultimately what we come to realize is that our greatest contribution is to heal the illusory divisions within ourselves.