Adyashanti reflects on how spiritual revelations of oneness or emptiness, often recounted as extraordinary experiences, can be misread as something foreign to ordinary life. He argues these realisations are simply seeing what is already the case, and that treating them as exotic keeps them at a distance.
Transcript
I remember when I was getting into all this in my early 20s and hearing uh mostly reading at that point actually reading spiritual discourses and um and then later talks from my teacher you know and you hear about oneness and emptiness and no self and you know all these things often seem so extraordinary in a sense because they're often told in stories where you know someone has some revelation and and and it's just an extraordinary experience. And so we think these things are extraordinary and of course when we see them for the first time they're extraordinary to us because we're seeing them for the first time. But you know when we see something as extraordinary there's a tendency to to actually put have it apart from us. But if we just stop what we're what I'm really talking about is the way that our uh mostly our the way we were taught dictate things we're taught dictates what we perceive. Right? So we all grew up in a world where we were taught duality really really well right wrong good bad these very sort of black and white dualities and that's understandable you know that that helps in some way especi if if it's done especially with some compassion and some wisdom it can help orient us towards sort of the uh the relative world and of course then we're as soon as we got language one of the first things we learn is our name and right there starts uh all what this this this acquiring of language literally starts to alter how we perceive life, right? So like when we get our name and then we get the self-consciousness that kind of comes through that utilizes that our language um to keep forming this image of ourselves and this image gets grow bigger and bigger and bigger and you can see it in kids as they're growing you can see them creating their image of themselves. Of course it's created by the people and life around them too. So it's not just the internal and external. Well, these are just sort of words we use too. Um because they're all influencing each other and this influence is actually creating this self that we have because everybody's talking about it and everybody seems to be relating to theirs and and then so we learn how to do that, right? We learned how to create that that that that imaginary sort of self. It's not that it's funny, you know, again the words we use like no self, right? And no self doesn't mean necessarily that there is like zero experience of self. Every everybody knows they have an experience they have experience of self. That can change of course, but no self is. It's just talking about the way things actually are. See, so none of these spiritual ideas, nothing needs to be added to us. We've already had plenty added, right? That's why so much of the the contemplative approach is sort of is a is sort of removing or at least suspending certain parts of the knowledge we have because that knowledge that we've been taught is changing the way per we perceive ourselves in the world. Right? So we're we don't come out of our mother's wombs perceiving the world dualistically. Quite the opposite actually. We perceive it in a holistic way, but in an unconscious holistic way, right? Sixmonth-old doesn't really know how they experience anything. They just experience it. Um, so if we if you really kind of get the feeling and that's the hardest thing to convey of what I'm trying to talk about here. What I'm really what I'm trying to convey is is the sense that that the reality that this isn't about addition, right? It's not about putting anything. It's not even about subtraction. It's not even about taking things away. Spiritual people often get very obsessed with I have to get rid of this part of myself and that part isn't quite advanced enough and I'm trying to get rid of this part and this part and this part and all the while they can be doing that with with little notions of do non-duality dancing around in their head which is interesting because when we're trying to get rid of some part of oursel we're operating in a profoundly dualistic way. So, we're often looking for the thing we need to add, right? Whether it's to add the right behavior or or the right experience or add the right the right something. But this deeper unity is not nothing needs to be added to it. It just is. It just is.