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

by Adyashanti

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. We cannot conceptualize what that state of being is like. Up until that point, we can

always conceptualize to some extent.

Even though I can’t speak about the whole jewel, I can speak from the place of truth. Then maybe someone listening will hear from that same place. It’s not a place that belongs to me; it is a place that’s true to what we are. It is that place of knowing.

Nobody owns what we are. It’s an equal gift. The journey of awakening is just remembering who and what we are, remembering what we’ve always known.

Bit by bit, if we are sincere, we begin to see each time we fixate. Somewhere, somehow, at some point in time,

something in us realizes that our awakening is not complete.

if witnessing is different from the witness, then there is an inherent division.

As I have said over and over, the seeing of an untruth is the biggest element in its dissolution. Make no mistake—to see a fixation within ourselves because someone explains it to us is not enough. It’s not enough to have somebody lay it out for you. It must be discovered in oneself, for oneself.

Full awakening comes when we take responsibility for ourselves.

I’m here to give hints and clues, and to question the answers you’ve already assumed are true. The true role of teachers is to question their students’ answers, not to sit around giving answers of their own.

the process offered me relief from that egoic mandate to be an athlete. It was the relief of being literally nobody. It had given me an even more visceral sense of what I had realized at twenty-five—that I was nobody, that I was unborn, undying, and uncreated. It was wonderful to feel this—to be nobody and nothing—on such a deeply human level.

even though you know it is a dream, you still have to deal with it. If the body and the mind and the personality are still divided, if there are still conflicts in your system that are unmet, there will be a gravitational pull to bring consciousness back into suffering.

When we are not willing to see what life is trying to show us, it will keep ramping up the intensity until we are willing to see what we need to see. In this way, life itself is our greatest ally.

What they actually want is to be really happy in their dream state. And that’s okay, if that’s as far as they’ve evolved.

It is an impulse that is willing to subject itself to whatever is needed in order to wake up. The authentic impulse toward enlightenment is that internal prayer asking for whatever it is that will bring us to a full awakening, no matter whether it turns out to be wonderful or terrible. It is an impulse that puts no conditions on what we have to go through.

This isn’t a journey about becoming something. This is about unbecoming who we are not, about undeceiving ourselves. In the end, it’s ironic. We don’t end up anywhere other than where we have always been, except that we perceive where we have always been completely differently. We realize that the heaven everyone is seeking is where we have always been.

Everything is already inherently complete, already fully Spirit. We are already as much as we will ever be. But the question is—do we know it? Have we realized it? If we have not, what is it that’s causing us to perceive otherwise? And if we have realized it, are we living it? Is it becoming actualized? Is it functioning in our lives?

And so one of the most important steps is to come into agreement with your life so that you’re not turning away from yourself in any way. And the amazing thing is that when we are no longer turning away from ourselves, we find a great amount of energy, a great capacity for clarity and wisdom, and we start to see everything we need to see.

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

Sometimes people will experience heart palpitations.

This transition may even wreak havoc with one’s memory. I’ve had many students develop memory problems, some who have even gotten checked for Alzheimer’s.

The most important thing is to relax and let the reorientation process happen.

What somebody else feels is theirs to feel. You may have access to it, but that doesn’t mean it is yours to experience.

One of the great poems of the Zen tradition ends with this description of the awakened state: “To be without anxiety about imperfection.”

In any moment, are you experiencing and acting from division, or are you experiencing and acting from oneness? Which is it?

As the light of awakening starts to penetrate on the level of mind, we see that mind has no inherent reality to it. It’s a tool that reality can use, but it’s not reality. In and of itself, a thought is just a thought. 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. You can think about a glass of water until you die, but to actually pick up a physical glass and drink the water is a totally different experience. You can pick up the glass and drink the water without any thought of glass or water. And so thought itself is empty; it’s empty of reality. 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. Many thoughts in human consciousness are just thoughts thinking about other thoughts—thinking about thinking. Meditators will be meditating, and one thought will be, “I shouldn’t be thinking.” But, of course, that thought is, itself, a thought. It’s very easy to get trapped in various loops of thinking about thinking.