“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing
to do with becoming better or being happier.
Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s
seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the
complete eradication of everything we imagined to be
true.” …………Adyashanti
I find a lot of resonance between the way I think with
that of Adyashanti. His spiritual wisdom comes from a deep experience. When I
read the above quote by him, I was taken to the first saying of Buddha upon his
state of awakening stated:
"Seeking but not finding the house builder, I
traveled through the round of countless births. Oh, painful is birth ever and
again! House builder, you have now been seen. You shall not build the house
again. Your rafters have been broken down; your ridge-pole is demolished too.
My mind has now attained the unformed nirvana and reached the end of every kind
of craving." ……….Dhammapada verses: 153 -156
All our lives we inherently question our origin, our
true nature and the purpose of our existence. But we conveniently assign a pre-given
state for our origin and destiny through an external religious dogma or a
dictum given by some external authority. The purpose of our life, for most of
us, is rooted in physical or material reality.
Any hard truth is blocked from these perceptions. To
delve deep into our true nature and fully realize the human person one has to
move beyond these limiting perceptions. Our deeper levels of consciousness
tries to nudge us to go beyond our sensory perceptions but we assign a
metaphysical or miraculous dimension to these promptings and externalize these
experience as something not subjective. These promptings through our deeper
levels of consciousness do frighten us and that is the reason that mystics
called these moments before some deep insights as “Dark night of the Soul”.
This darkness is overpowering and threatens to
exterminate our very existence in the world of comfortable external objective
perceptions.
Buddha’s words capture the full meaning of what it
means to attain this awakening to our authentic self.
Only a creature looks for the creator and the
convenient form allocated to the creator is the form of the creature as scriptures
tell us that we are created in the image of the omnipotent creator. This is a
disastrous reverse engineering that we creatures embark on. Hence in Buddha’s
words the only way of realizing the true nature is for both the creator (house
builder) and the creature (house) from a stance of nondual perception. The
impediment to our perception of our true self comes from our inherent
attachment to or craving for the false reality of our sensory realities. This
is possible only when our true nature is perceived as which is formless,
birthless and deathless. This is the unformed nirvana of which Buddha speaks.
How do we embark on this process of making a radical
shift in our conscious thinking. Here again the spiritual wisdom of Adyashanti
points the way in the following advice:
"Sitting in stillness is all about going to the
root of being. This root is also the root of movement, energy, and emptiness.
The mind may be busy, but you can open to the silence from which thought
arises. Focus on the background rather than on the foreground of experience.
The more you relax the easier it is. Utilize the stillness within the subtle
body to unite with the stillness of awareness. From that stillness all movement
arises without disturbing the inherent stillness at the center of things."
……………Adyashanti
Stillness of mind starts with the stillness of the
body. A regressive path must be followed. The mind is always busy but through
deep slow breathing the mind can be made to regress to deeper backgrounds. The
background and fore grounds which we talk of here is from the current
perception levels. The foreground is a collection of past experiences. The
radical shift has to be made to ignore these impressions and move to unseen,
unheard, untouched, un-smelt and untasted realms. This is why the root is
defined as movement, energy, and emptiness. None of these are perceptible
entities but can only be inferred by their effects which are universal and defy
any assignment of particularity.
When Nicodemus asks Jesus about as to how one can be
born of the spirit, Jesus replies:
“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its
sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is
with everyone born of the Spirit.” …….John 3:8
The one who is born of the spirit realizes his
universal or cosmic nature.
Love to you all.