Adyashanti explores the disorienting experience of sudden awakening through the story of a woman who "disappeared" on the street — and why the loss of a solid self is both terrifying and ultimately liberating.
Transcript
A few weeks ago, I was up in Vancouver teaching like this and a a girl came up to the microphone and she told me that she had never really been spiritual. She had never really been on a spiritual journey. She'd never been into this whole enlightenment thing. She didn't even know what it was all about. One day she's just walking along and she said, "I just disappeared. I just didn't exist anymore." And I said, "Wonderful." And she said, "Wonderful? It's terrible." And I said, "Wonderful?" And she said, "I know it's wonderful, but it's terrible. I just disappeared like I don't exist anymore." And I said, "I'm wonderful." And she said, "Really?" I said, "Oh, it depends on how you look at it. So, you never know whether you're on a spiritual journey, whether you're actually pursuing awakening or enlightenment, or you're just walking down the street with a bagel and a cup of coffee in your hand. You never know. The bottom could just drop out at any time. And you, as you've known yourself to be, can just be seen totally through. and you see that you're nothing almost almost to the extent that it almost feels like you don't even exist which kind of is kind of drives you a little bit crazy because you're sitting there feeling I don't exist and then there you are saying to yourself I don't exist so your mind says I must exist and the rest of you says but I really don't not as a thing not as a person not as an idea because it all just falls away one day. Kind of perplexing place to find yourself. Kind of unusual place to find yourself. And it's really the end of not knowing what you are. And it's the beginning of the opening of a possibility. Because really awakening is not only the end of not knowing what we are. We realize oursel we realize what we really are which is really nothing at all which ends up being everything but I'm not going to even explain that for now. Each person has to find that out for themselves. You all have to find out that you're nothing. And only then do you find out that the nothing is actually everything. But nonetheless, there you are. And all of a sudden, your motivates, your whole way of looking at things changes. It's going to confuse you probably. A few people it doesn't. The other 99% it does. There you are. You wake up one day. It's almost like you don't even exist. Except somehow you do. Everything that drew that drove you that suddenly has fallen away. So you might not even know should I get up out of bed? Should I go to work today? Should I call my friends? And something inside you says, what's the point? And you realize because everything drops dropped away that there isn't a point which depending on how you're hooked up can either cause you to have a great big belly laugh or a total catastrophic existential download of fear. Just kind of depends on how you're hooked up. And even more sort of schizophrenic than that, you might have both at the same time. You might find yourself sort of laughing and also being absolutely terrified and going back and forth between the two states. This funny place to find yourself when you've never been there. When everything starts to fall away, you see for yourself, not from an idea, not from a theory, that nothing that you ever really thought is true. None of those ideas and opinions that you just see, they all just fall away. You see them like something you once valued that now it's just like confetti. It might still be in you in your mind, in your being, but you can't really value it anymore because it's like confetti. And that's kind of strange when you can't even believe your beliefs. Have you run into that yet? You you have a belief, but you can't believe it. You can't invest it with meaning or significance. And then you go to your friend and you knock on their door and you say, "Hey, can you still believe your beliefs?" And they go, "Yes, I can." And you say, "The funniest thing happened. I was walking down the road and everything dropped out and I can't believe my my beliefs anymore and I can't actually take my opinions seriously and it's actually like I don't exist and I'm like nothing and nothing's actually happening and nothing's actually going on." And at about that time, your friend is looking in the phone book for the nearest psych psychologist or psychiatric ward or whatever. And then you start to realize nobody really understands this. As this girl in Vancouver said to me, she says, "All my friends think I'm nuts." I said, "Don't worry, you'll get used to it. They'll get used to it, too." which isn't very com comforting when you're going through it. You know, in fact, I said, "Don't worry. It just gets worse. There'll be less ideas. There'll be less to hold on. There'll be less of you. You'll take yourself less and less and less seriously, and your opinions will be less and less and less and less and less and less, and it will just get worse." And she said, 'You know, str that's has us that's strangely comforting. It's funny when we start to really wake up things that seem very uncomfortable all of a sudden seem comforting because somehow we start to know what's really so what's really true. But it is strange at first to find yourself in a state of being where there's very little sort of um obvious instinct of how to be. Very very little obvious instinct of how to be, how to move. Because initially when we realize the truth of our being, it's a vast infinite space. We are a vast infinite space. A space that doesn't hold everything the egos hold. It has it doesn't want things. It doesn't crave satisfaction. It's not pushing things away and it's not pulling things towards it. And it all sounds quite wow that's interesting until it happens to you. And when it happens to you, it's quite confusing. What's happening? I'm not grasping for anything. I'm not wanting and I'm not pushing away. What's wrong with me? I'm not pushing away the things I don't like and I'm not grasping for the things I do like. You can hear it a hundred times, but when it comes alive in you, it's something quite different. And of course there's the overwhelmingly positive aspect to it all that there is a great underlying joy and relief from what gets dropped, what gets put down. It often feels like, and some of you know this, like taking off an immense backpack that you never knew you were carrying around your whole life. It's a backpack called me. My life, my past, what happened to me, who I hate, who I like, who I resent, all the people who never understood me. It's all in there and then it just sort of spontaneously gets taken off. So, this is a great relief. This is a great joy of awakening to our true nature. And yet what they don't tell you is even in the midst of that it can be quite disorienting. They don't tell you that because it's not a good sales point for enlightenment. You might walk around totally disoriented for a while, for days, weeks, months, maybe years. You really won't have you really won't find your rudder. You know your rudder, what's going to drive you through life. It might disappear. Maybe suddenly, maybe gradually. Often a combination of both. Your personal relationship with the divine will be toast because God is an object out there just won't make sense anymore. And you might like that. You might be very happy about that. And you might be really upset about it like somebody took my God away. But in the end, it's better to be the thing you're seeking than to seek the thing you're seeking.