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This week we talk to Adyashanti about waking up
Adyashanti, author of The Way of Liberation, Resurrecting Jesus, Falling into Grace, and The End of Your World, is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence.
Asked to teach in 1996 by his Zen teacher of 14 years, Adyashanti offers teachings that are free of any tradition or ideology. “The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine, but is open to all and found within all.” Based in California, Adyashanti teaches throughout the U.S. and in Canada, Europe, and Australia.
In This Interview, Adyashanti and I Discuss…
- That our work as humans is on the journey from a walking contradiction to a walking paradox
- That if we see something out of alignment with our value system we feel it in our body as tension
- That our bodies are our best aid when it comes to navigating our inner consciousness
- That there are different types of awakening
- That awakening is a fundamental shift of identity
- The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions but to question your answers
- What to do when you WANT to change but then you can’t seem to change
- The 5 foundations of spirituality
- What is my aspiration?
- That wanting to feel pleasure can only take us so far
- When we start feeling better we’ll stop looking deeper
- Never abdicate your authority
- That “true” meditation is the art of allowing everything to be exactly as it is
- That meditation is there for us to get experiential insight into the nature of our being, our consciousness
- The importance of bringing your intelligence along for the ride in meditation
- To let go of what the outcome should be in meditation
- Our whole body is a sensory instrument through which we experience life
- That self-inquiry is joining the intellectual mind with the contemplative spirit
- An unresolved deep question is often what sparks an awakening
- How contemplation is different from meditation and inquiry
- The three means of evoking insight: contemplation, meditation, and inquiry
- The Jesus story is a map for awakening
- How the Jesus story is so compelling
- What life is like for awakened people
- That awakening can be sudden and/or it can be a gradual unfolding
- How enlightenment is the end of one game and the beginning of another
- The difference between exploration and seeking
- Whether or not psychedelic drugs play a role in awakening
Adyashanti Links
A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other.
One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear.
The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”
The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feedThe Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable.
This parable goes by many names including:
The Tale of Two Wolves
The Parable of the Two Wolves
Two Wolves
Which Wolf Do You Feed
Which Wolf are You Feeding
Which Wolf Will You Feed
It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.
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