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

by Adyashanti

You need to be willing to question everything, to stop and ask yourself, “Do I really know what I think I know, or have I just taken on the beliefs and opinions of others? What do I actually know. and what do I want to believe or imagine? What do I know for certain?”

This one 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. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions—things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.

The path of awakening is not about positive emotions. On the contrary, enlightenment may not be easy or positive at all. It is not easy to have our illusions crushed. It is not easy to let go of long-held perceptions.

If our orientation is simply to feel better in each moment, then we’ll continue to delude ourselves, because trying to feel better in the moment is exactly how we delude ourselves.

In ancient times, people having this experience entered protected environments such as monasteries—places where those around them would understand. They’d be put in a nice little cell and left alone to let the process happen.

This is where the spiritual ego comes in. It is a protective process and also a vestige of the need for a contextual sense of self.

If we have seen the truth, we have seen the truth. Whether we’ve seen it for two seconds or for two thousand years, it’s the same truth.

With Awakening, the Stakes Go Up

When we act from a place of untruth anyway, in spite of our knowing, it’s much more painful than when we didn’t know our actions were untrue.

As we become more conscious, we begin to see that there are consequences. There are consequences to everything, and they get bigger and bigger the more we behave in ways that are not in harmony with what we know is true. This is actually a wonderful thing. It is what I call fierce grace. It is not a soft grace; it is not the kind of grace that is beautiful and uplifting. But it is a grace nonetheless. We know that when we act from what is not true, we will only be causing ourselves pain. That knowing is a grace.

Another word for conditioning is karma.

You’ll notice that if you get to know somebody well, if you become their great friend or lover or mate, you also get to know their conditioning. Because of this you can predict, with great accuracy, how they will react in a given circumstance—what they will want, what they won’t want, what they will tend to avoid, and what they will tend to move toward. Once we get to know one another’s conditioning, behavior becomes very predictable.

each person has a different karmic load that he or she carries.

What makes more sense is to ask how you unenlighten yourself. What is still held on to? What is still confusing? What situations in life can get you to believe things that aren’t true and cause you to go into contradiction, suffering, and separation? What is it specifically that has the power to entice consciousness back into the gravitational field of the dream state? We should not ask, “How do I stay awake?” Instead we should ask, “How is it that I’m unenlightening myself? How is it specifically that I’m putting myself back in illusion?”

The process here becomes one of coming into right relationship with yourself and looking deeply at what it is that causes you to go back into the trance of separation. You need to start pinpointing the particular ways, the particular thoughts, the particular beliefs that put you back to sleep.

What is required is the willingness to let life impact you; to let yourself see when life impacts you; to see if you go into any sort of separation about it, if you go into judgment, if you go into blame, if you go into “should” or “shouldn’t,” if you start to point the finger somewhere other than at yourself.

Before awakening, our own conditioning was viewed as extraordinarily personal. Our conditioning defined us. We derived a sense of self from our conditioning, from our false self, from our beliefs and opinions and desires and all the rest. Before awakening we were enmeshed in the dream state, and the dream state defined us. Once awakening has happened—if it’s real, if it’s authentic—we realize that even if illusions persist, they’re not personal, and they don’t define us.

To allow that to happen, as a human being, we have to be willing to be honest with ourselves. While not denying what we’ve seen, we also have to see how things are, right here and right now. We need to look. We need to ask: “What in me can still go into division? What in me can still go into hate, into ignorance, into greed? What in me can cause me to feel divided, isolated, full of sorrow? Where are those spots in me that are less than awakened?”

I say, start with something very simple. Stop avoiding things. If there is anything that is unresolved in yourself, turn toward it. Face it. Look at it. Stop avoiding it. Stop moving the other way. Stop using a moment of awakening as a means to not deal with something that may be less than awake within you.

In the aftermath of an awakening, some very powerful thought forms may arise—things we pushed down very deeply, that we tried to keep unconscious. But now everything starts to come into the light of being.

When we inquire, it is important that we are using both body and mind; both feeling and thought. We must see which thoughts generate which feelings, and which thoughts are generated from feelings.

When I would go to the coffee shop with a pad of paper and a pencil, I would get very specific about exactly what the thought was that caused that moment of reidentification, and I would start to write about it. I would look at exactly how that thought viewed the world. To do that, I would have to enter into how I felt.

Most of us have had difficult moments in our lives, and in those times we’ve developed spontaneous coping strategies. When we are young and an event happens that causes us more pain than we are able to face head on, we come up with a belief that allows us to survive the situation.

Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.

Only when we see that our thoughts, judgments, and opinions are just as true as their opposites are the polarities of thought balanced. If the opposing thought is just as true as the thought I believe, then the whole structure of thought collapses. If an opinion that is different from mine has just as much right to exist as mine does, then it’s impossible to say which opinion is real or true. They’re both either real or not real. When we see this, there’s an internal balancing of the opposites, and thought is no longer polarized. Only when thought is balanced in this way does the dualistic structure of thinking lose its validity and start to collapse.

We don’t come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don’t come to heaven by avoiding hell or trying to sidestep it. We don’t come to clarity by avoiding confusion. We don’t come to freedom by avoiding that which is less than freedom. The truth is quite the opposite.

Our illusions—the beliefs we hold on to—are the very doorways to our freedom.

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 couldn’t possibly emphasize this more: the texture and flow of our lives, from moment to moment, is itself what reveals freedom. Life itself shows us what we need to see through in order to be free.

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. Of course, they don’t have control anyway, but they would have no illusion of control, either.

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. We have been conditioned to believe that there are times when it is okay to be truthful and honest, and there are times when it is not okay to be truthful and honest.

“I and all beings everywhere have simultaneously realized liberation.”

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.

It is really a question of sincerity. As I said, this is not a self-improvement program. Once you discover the level of sincerity and honesty I am describing, you find that sincerity and honesty are manifestations of the absolute nature of being.

If you do try to hide from something—if you are in a relationship that is dysfunctional or a job that is tremendously unsatisfying, and you choose not to deal with it—the consequence of that denial is that you will not truly be liberated. You won’t ever be capable of being fully free, because any area where we choose to remain unconscious will ultimately have an impact upon us, as well as upon others.

Encountering the fact that I could not get rid of this arrogance, no matter what I tried, was one of the first experiences I had—and there would be many more—of the futility of personal will.

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.

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.

It’s one thing to say that everything is already heaven, that everybody is already awake, that everyone is already Spirit. It’s true, but as one wise Zen master said long ago, “A fat lot of good that does you if you don’t know it.” Once again, what is required is a certain sense of honesty. 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?

Some people come to me and say, “I feel everything everybody else is feeling. I feel what is happening inside everybody else.” That may sound mystical and nice, but think about the fact that most people are conflicted. Who wants to go around feeling everybody’s conflicted energy?

Awakening at the Level of the Mind

Emotional turmoil tells us that we have an unconscious belief that isn’t true. Our mind has packaged something—maybe it has packaged an event in the present; maybe it has packaged the past. What we know is that it has packaged an event in such a way that it is causing us turmoil.

Our emotional life and our intellectual life are not actually separate; they are one thing. Our emotional life reveals our unconscious intellectual life. We react emotionally to thoughts that we often don’t even know we’re having; in that way, those unconscious thoughts are made manifest.

This much is assured: if we argue with reality, for any reason, we will go into division. That is just the way it works. Reality is simply what is. As soon as we have anything in us that judges it, that condemns it, that says it shouldn’t be, we will feel division.

How Do Emotions Hold Together the Illusion of the Separate Self?

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 ourselves. It is that little conclusion—that I am th...

As we start to wake up from the fixations and identifications at the level of mind and the level of emotion, we come to see that there isn’t someone to be hurt; there isn’t anyone or anything to be threatened by life. In truth, we are life itself. When we see and perceive that we are the totality of life, we are no longer afraid of it; we no longer feel afraid of birth, life, and death. But until we see that, we will see life as intimidating, as a barrier we somehow have to get through.

ultimately the whole of spirituality boils down to letting go of the illusion of the separate self, letting go of the way we think the world is and the way we think it should be.

I would say that my experience is that I no longer believe the next thought that I have. I’m not capable of actually believing a thought that happens. I have no control over what thoughts appear, but I can’t believe that the thought is real or true or significant.

We don’t need to know so much about what to do. We need to have a mirror in front of us, so we are able to see what we see. When that alcoholic sees and that drug addict sees that there is nothing they can do, that they are powerless to stop their addiction—only then do they start to see themselves in a clearer light.