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

by Adyashanti

how important it is to look to our own direct experience and fearlessly explore the territory of our own lives.

We realize—often quite suddenly—that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs, and images, is not really who we are. It doesn’t define us; it has no center.

ego is simply the mechanism our mind uses to resist life as it is.

Why does the mind need a mechanism that resists life?

It is the resistance to what is.

sense of a self

sense of self defined as being separate from the world around us

shift in one’s perception.

whatever our senses come into contact with

is experienced as ourselves.

In truth, we are not capable of imagining what it is that we are. Our nature is literally beyond all imagination.

We are that which dreams the whole world into existence.

Spiritual awakening reveals that that which is unspeakable and unexplainable is actually what we are.

We are the unexplainable, the unspeakable

Full awakening simply means that we perceive from the perspective of Spirit—from the view of oneness—all the time.

full awakening - to see everything from the perspective of oneness

nonabiding awakening.

Reality is nuclear;

accurate to talk about what we lose upon awakening rather than what we gain.

It is not possible to imagine something outside of the dream state when our consciousness is still within it.

dissolving our remaining fixations—our hang-ups,

Path of awakening - dissolving our hangups/fixations

before awakening, our personality structure feels much weightier, much heavier, much denser, because our whole identity is actually wrapped up in our conditioning.

After awakening we know that the conditioning of our body-mind system is not personal; we know that it doesn’t define us.

That knowledge, that living truth, makes it much easier and much less threatening to address the ...

before awakening we are doing it from the perspective of separation, and after awakening we are doing it from the perspective of nonseparation.

Don’t mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself.

I ask you to keep in mind that everything I am teaching must be awakened to. It must be lived for it to be real.

question—“What do I know for certain?”—is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it’s meant to.

“What do I know for certain?” is also an invaluable tool once awakening has happened. Asking yourself this question aids in the dissolution of limitations and ideas, as well as the tendency to fixate—all of which continue after awakening.

shrouded

There may be bliss with awakening, because it is actually a by-product of awakening, but it is not awakening itself.

bliss is not awakening in itself

bhajans.

The human consciousness is tremendously pliable,

We must give up the pursuit of positive emotional states through spiritual practice.

from a very deep place within us. It comes from a place that wants the truth more than it wants to feel good.

trying to feel better in the moment is exactly how we delude ourselves.

In order to awaken, we must break out of the paradigm of always seeking to feel better.

the impulse to awaken.

When we are blindly doing what we are told—blindly following a teaching simply because it is ancient or revered—we end up with just what we’re asking for: blindness.

when we are talking about spiritual awakening, we are not talking about personal experience. We are talking about awakening from the “me.”

Spiritual awakening isn’t about me

Everything we see, everything we feel, everything we hear is literally a manifestation of the same thing.

everything is a manifestation of the same thing

The seeker has in some sense accomplished its task. It provided the necessary momentum to help propel consciousness or Spirit out of its identification with the dream state and helped it to return back to its natural state of being.

It is the experiential knowledge that everything is actually being done. that you as a separate entity aren’t doing anything.

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

Even if we’ve seen very deeply and the transformation has been great, there is still a basic personality structure present. But what used to fuel our personality, all of its old orienting principles and self-centered drives, has either disappeared or is in the process of disappearing.

Awakening- identification with our personality dissolves

it is common for some of these interests to start to wane, especially if their interest in the activity had been fueled by the energy of separation.

Awakening begins the process. The result of the awakening—its fallout or aftermath—is a radical dissolving of ego.

awakening begins the process towards ego dissolution

This does not mean that the ego will be in cooperation. The ego may resist this dissolution with everything it has. It may bring out the entirety of its arsenal.

What’s more useful is to understand that to be disoriented is part of the process of awakening; it is natural to be disoriented, because everything is new. You are new, your perception is new, and your perception of everything and everyone has now changed.

Reality does not need an orientation. If there is an orientation, it is the orientation of a deep sense of relaxation, of allowing everything to be.

You find your orientation by letting go totally.

this energy exists and is moving through us all of the time; it is the energy of nondivision.

The dream state has a gravitational force; it has the tendency to pull consciousness into itself.

Awakening is breaking free of this gravitational force.