Read

May/June 2005 Living Now
Emptiness Dancing, An Interview with Adyashanti

by Connie Hill

After a series of transformative spiritual awakenings, Adyashanti began teaching. Adya's teachings have been compared to some of the early Zen masters of China and teachers of Advaita Vedanta in India. Adyashanti is the author of Emptiness Dancing and My Secret is Silence.

Connie: Although I’ve spent lots of time preparing for this interview, I still don’t know what to ask you, so I’ll just jump in. Can you tell me what you mean by awareness?

Adyashanti: Awareness… all of us have a cultural understanding of what awareness is. When I use that word I’m using it in that sense, but only in the most rudimentary sense. There also is the ultimate reality of what we really are. That expands the notion of awareness quite a bit. Ordinary everyday awareness is something we think we possess, like "I am aware" or "I have awareness." That’s a fundamental illusion. When we investigate what this awareness is or who is aware, we can’t find this elusive something or someone who possesses awareness. When one looks into that deeply enough and sees it profoundly enough, we can see that there isn’t someone who is aware. It’s actually the opposite. We are the awareness, itself. This ordinary, everyday awareness that is looking through everybody's eyes, all the time, and hearing through their ears is so easy to dismiss. This everyday awareness is actually the gateway. Most people in spiritual circles are looking for an altered state of awareness. Awareness or consciousness has the capacity to go into almost any infinite variety of states. In spiritual circles, the ones that people seek would be called mystical states. We think that is the ultimate reality rather than just a state that awareness can take. When I use the word awareness I’m actually using it in the sense of fundamental building block of all experiences.

C: Tell me a little about your spiritual history. How did you get to where you are now?

A: It started when I was 19 or 20. I got the enlightenment bug. Then I found a Zen teacher that I studied with for the next 15 years. I did a lot of seeking, which in my case was a tremendous amount of meditation. Over the next 10 or 12 years I basically worked and meditated. That’s pretty much all I did. I like to point out that there is not a cause and effect relationship, or that all the meditation or seeking paid off in awakening. It was actually kind of the opposite. Seeking really didn’t pay off except that I just burned it out. When we actually burn our seeking out, when it extinguishes itself, its much easier for the truth to be seen. Seeking actually gets in the way.

C: Is that the same as surrender or hitting bottom from 12-step traditions?

A: Yes, I guess so. You hit your bottom or for me, I hit the limitation of my personal will. That’s when we actually become available. For some reason a lot of us have to get to that place. We have to be brought to our knees. Most of us are not so evolved that we just surrender out of divine intelligence.

C: I read in your book that your awakening came when you were sitting in meditation.

A: Yes, that was the culmination. Parts of that same experience had presented itself over the years before. These were sort of like glimpses of awakening and were pretty cathartic. In the experience you mentioned it happened without any emotional bi-product. It was just sort of a scene of the truth which allowed me to grasp "This is the truth. This is really what I am. This is what we are." Finally, I didn’t fool myself into being seduced by the emotional bi-product.

As soon as I started to teach I saw that my path and what I did are not necessary for everybody. Many people are guided directly. I’ve had people come in with no spiritual resume whatever, friends dragged them. They come in and we have a little talk and all of a sudden, boom, they see! Sometimes you see their friends with 30 years of spiritual seeking saying "Come on! They didn’t do anything!" This, I think, is actually the beautiful thing about it. You can’t draw a specific cause and effect relationship. We want predictability and that view assumes that it’s not here now. So our very search becomes a form of denying the truth, even though the search may be necessary for a lot of people. It’s very telling that the seeking is the way we hide the truth.

C: What I’ve found is that being spiritual doesn’t erase problems.

A: That is one of the myths of enlightenment. I tell people all the time there is nothing in this for you. The seeker doesn’t get enlightened. There is no practical advantage for the ego. It doesn’t make you more beautiful or rich. Some people are still going to like you, some people aren’t. If anything your mommy and daddy still won’t understand you and they may understand you a whole lot less. The nice thing is that you just don’t care any more.

C: Tell me what happens in a satsang.

A: We usually start out with 10 or so minutes of meditation or quiet. I usually give a talk for 20-40 minutes, about various ways of pointing to what’s already awake. Then I open it up to questions. I usually have another chair by me for them to sit in so it’s less impersonal. It’s like dakusan or a zen private meeting. I think satsang takes the privateness out of it and now those private meetings are actually public. But with the extra chair people get to see how a teacher works with a student, in a public way. What one person struggles with tends to be very much like what everyone struggles with. I think just that, in and of itself, taking the secrecy out of it is very powerful.

C: Is there anything else you’d like to say?

A: The thing I like to get across is that it’s possible to awaken in an authentic and deep way at any moment in time. The key is to get your mind out of the future. When that energy gets out of the future, everything is available right now. That’s what is important. There isn’t a prerequisite to awakening. If you need 30 years of practice, fine. If you’re willing to do it right now, fine. It doesn’t matter which you choose.

C: Thanks, Adya.

Adyashanti will be at New Renaissance on Thursday, May 19 for a sold out satsang. You may attend the book signing afterwards at 8:15 pm. Call 503-224-4929 for info or call 503-235-4140 for info about his other Portland events.

Connie Hill works at New Renaissance Bookshop and is a local astrologer. She can be reached at 971-244-0567 ext. 2 or gmnite@yahoo.com.