Taking the One Seat: Spiritual Autonomy and the Soul’s Discovery of Meaning

The complete self-guided online course will be available at www.adyashanti.org

Taking the One Seat: Spiritual Autonomy and the Soul’s Discovery of Meaning
Online Course ~ November 2017
Notes and Q&A

Published by Open Gate Sangha, Inc.

San Jose, CA 95128

© 2017 by Adyashanti. All rights reserved.

Editing Team: Susan Kurtz, Julie Donovan, Batya Yasgur, Paula Jacobs, Arielle Nugent, and David
Michelson
WEEK ONE
Notes from Adyashanti
Adyashanti’s Definition of Terms
While the ground of being may be completely beyond both meaning and purpose, the individual
expression of that ground is given direction and oriented to the world through the prism of meaning.
By bringing to light how the ground of being functions through the individual, we discover a degree
of spiritual autonomy that allows and challenges us to what in Zen is called “taking the one seat.”
Absolute and Relative Views - The absolute view is one of transcendent unity beyond all forms of
dualism. The relative view is one of the manifest world, which is comprised of the dynamic play of
opposites.
Spiritual Autonomy - An independence of spirit capable of manifesting the enlightened condition
in daily living for the highest possible good.
Meaning - The experience of being in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. It is the
feeling of being in alignment, focused and in harmony. It is the experience of your human life being
in alignment with the cosmos.
Embodying the Enlightened Condition - The enlightened condition includes both our absolute
and relative natures. It is all-inclusive, all-embracing reality.
Egocentric Values - Egocentric values are based in separation. They are what you desire strictly for
your own benefit. They are not necessarily bad, just self-centered.
Soul Values - Values inherent to one’s true being. Soul values are self-transcendent, archetypal values
that are meaningful enough to dedicate your life to manifesting. They are derived from what you love
and care enough about to make sacrifices for in order to manifest them in your life, for the benefit of
both yourself and all beings.
Soul values are transcendent, meaning that they are expressions of the inherent unity of all existence
and are good for both you and others. They are also timeless in the sense of being perennial
expressions of transcendent goodness, beyond the dualism of good versus bad. And soul values
are true, meaning that they are the best expressions of the highest possible good that can be
conceptualized.
Soul values are living manifestations of the enlightened condition in time and space. They orient
you away from self-obsession, violence, and suffering, and toward the unity of being, the honesty of
truth, and the compassion and intimacy of selfless love. Examples of soul values are truth, honesty,
love, peace, courage, unity, freedom, etc.

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Session 1 Notes
What the Course Explores
• This course is about the discovery of spiritual autonomy and the soul’s meaning.
• It is not essential to have an awakened experience for this course.
• Many of us have spiritual insights or awakenings, but how do we bring these into our daily lives?
• It is one thing to feel free when we’re unchallenged, but what about when life is extraordinarily
challenging?
• What would it mean to sincerely embody and live from our depth daily?
• How does the relative world become transparent to the ground of our being?

Whole Enlightenment: Embodying the Absolute and the

Relative
• Enlightenment isn’t just the discovery of the absolute; it’s where we discover we are big
enough to embody the absolute and the relative.
• We all start out with the relative view of things, which is the egoic position. To call it “egoic” is
not judgmental; it’s just the way of perceiving in which you are the center of the immensity of
life and you’re doing the best that you can.
• Through a yearning for peace, happiness, and that which is connected, we can find a window
into the ground of our being.
• Enlightenment embraces the whole aspect of the human life with its body, mind, challenges,
personalities, and apparent separation.
• Waking up to the ground of being doesn’t give you a pass on being human.
• Each of us embodies the entirety of reality—the absolute unconditioned perfection and the
relative conditioning. Nothing is left out.

Meaning and Purpose as Orientation

• The absolute ground of our being is unconditioned. Meaning and purpose are not relevant
from this perspective. Yet simultaneously in the relative, human experience, meaning has
importance; it gives us an orientation in life and a pathway through which our absolute
nature can manifest itself.
• The awakening experience can be disorienting as the egoic center begins to fall away. When
we try to act in time and space without orientation, we have a hard time knowing where our
relating is going to come from.
• A reorientation is necessary if we are to live from the deepest place that we know, whatever the
depth of our understanding is.

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Defining Soul & Soul Values
• The soul in this course is defined as our deepest being; it is not an individual soul in the way it’s
commonly thought of.
• Soul values are inherent to one’s true being.
• Soul values are self-transcendent, archetypal values that are meaningful enough to dedicate
your life to manifesting.
• David Brooks, in his book entitled The Road to Character, discusses eulogy values as opposed
to résumé values as a way to emphasize the importance of building inner character and
radiating from a deeper place within.

The Good Beyond “Good and Bad”

• We are not exploring the traditional values of “right versus wrong” or “good versus bad” in this
course, which might describe a war between our deeper nature versus our more flawed one.
Rather, we are exploring life orientations that make it possible to live from our deepest being.
• We are talking here about the “good beyond good and bad,” not the good that is the
opposite of bad.
• Living “the good beyond good and bad” involves living from our depth.

Spiritual Maturity vs. Spiritual Addiction

• If we try to hold onto or sustain certain experiences, we will be going about it the wrong way.
Although we might prefer good experiences, we can become addicted to them.
• A mature spiritual person isn’t addicted to special experiences.
• Your soul values align with an enlightened view of things.
• By translating our deepest experience of being into time and space, we develop spiritual
autonomy—an independence of spirit capable of manifesting the enlightened condition in
daily living for the highest possible good.
• Spiritual materialism is pursuing spirituality for what it can give the individual. Most people
begin their spiritual lives with self-centered desires, which is totally natural. But the word
“spirituality” is oriented beyond self-centered desires and is rooted in the whole, which is larger
than the egoic self.

Closing the Gap

• We need to connect our deepest experience of being with our human experience of being.
This hook-up varies greatly with different people, and the two don’t always arise together. The
connection isn’t inherent to deep and powerful experiences.
• Closing the gap between the absolute and the relative experience of being is essential if we
are to be unified human beings.
• Closing the gap brings meaning back into life. This meaning is not a philosophical idea, but

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 rather the experience of being in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time. We
become aligned with the cosmos.

Sacrificing for Soul Values

• Today, everyone is looking for meaning in a seemingly trivial world. We are encouraged to
participate in a life that makes us divided and unhappy. We sacrifice our souls, our depth, and
our true nature. It is a psychological disease.
• Discover your deepest experience of being. Don’t just look at a list of values and choose the one
you prefer.
• Your soul values are the primary ways you hook up human life with the ground of being
itself. They orient your whole life and you are willing to sacrifice for them.
• Even when we come into alignment with the truth of our being, it requires a willingness to
sacrifice that which competes with these values. You must let go of the things that don’t serve
your soul values.
• There is no end to the process of embodying our soul values.
• I’m not trying to invoke your idealism. I want you to refer to your deepest experience of being,
what you hold as most valuable, as worthy of orienting your life toward.
• Make room to express the imperfection of our human nature.

Always Being, Always Becoming

• We are always and already whole and complete. We don’t become what we are, which is
the ground of being itself. Simultaneously, we are always becoming in our relative human
experience of being. When our mind looks, it sees this paradox, but there is no paradox
when this is directly experienced with clarity.
• The relative manifests the whole through the birth of soul values.
• You’ll never become what you are, but you can become more fully embodied.

Taking the One Seat

• You’ll always be in a process of embodying what you always and already are. That’s the
paradox, and that’s what it means to take the one seat.
• Taking the one seat means to stand up in your life, to take on the whole of your life.
• Most people aren’t taking full responsibility for their lives. They succumb to an inner moral
critic or become a victim.
• Take back your dominion and find the quiet place inside—don’t give yourself to the critical
narrative.
• True spiritual autonomy is hard won. It is not a gift.
• Examine everything in the light of your soul values. Bring these values into every domain of
your life.

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 • The adventure of manifesting is not about what you are doing, but rather where you are doing it
from. Look at what you are expressing through whatever you’re doing.
• This is not about being perfect.

Caller #1: Translating Soul Values into Human Values

• Integrity can be a soul value that orients you. It appears to be relative but it is also connected to
something much bigger.
• How might you translate expansive freedom into a relative value in your human life? What
would it mean for you to be an expression of freedom by giving others the freedom to be?
Could it then be a relative human value?
• When you find one soul value, it connects with all the others.
• Another word for love is undividedness. The less divided you feel, the more loving you are.

Caller #2: Widening the View of Purpose

• We usually think of purpose in a narrow way. We think that if we find the one right thing,
our life will have meaning. Actually, the opposite is true. What if you orient your values in
everything that you do?
• You will know when you’re doing what you’re meant to be doing because you will be in
alignment.
• See how you’re oriented in the moment, not what you are doing in the moment.

Caller #3: Living Soul Values More Closely

• A soul value of unity involves connectedness and engagement—to really connect we have to be
unguarded.
• Take 3-5 moments or engagements and explore what would happen if you engaged in a way
that expressed unity.
• There is commonly a mild or overt fear of connecting deeply.
• Try leaning into the moment rather than leaning away.

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Supplemental Teaching 1:
Week 1 Exercise:
Clarifying & Committing to Soul Values
• Soul values are self-transcendent, archetypal values that are meaningful enough to dedicate
your life to manifesting. They are derived from what you love andwhat you care enough about
to make sacrifices for in order to manifest them; in your life for the benefit of yourself and all
beings.
• Archetypal values are something that exists within our collective unconscious. They are not
simply relevant to ourselves personally, but these are truths that survive the test of time.

Written Practice
In the written exercises, try to be as succinct as you can. When we are brief, we are actually the most
clear and powerful—it pulls the most clarity from you.

What self-transcendent archetypal value is meaningful enough for you to dedicate your life
to?
• These values give shape and form to the way we experience meaning in our lives.
• Find through this exercise those timeless values that are important to you enough to orient your
life around, to aim for, to embody and manifest in your life. These values are what give meaning
and significance, and purpose, and direction to your life.

Daily Practice
Each day ask yourself the question:

What’s the one thing that I can do today to express the most meaningful possible value that
I know?
• Notice how often we’re not speaking what’s really true. We are often shading the truth a little bit
so we can manipulate the direction of a conversation and have it tilt for a particular outcome.
• Endeavor to be as truthful and honest as you can in each conversation during the day.
• How are our deepest experiences of truth going to become part of our lives if we’re anything less
than truthful, real, authentic and honest?

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Week 1 Q&A
Starting to Tell the Truth
Q: I think truth is my question, but I stumble in my conviction, as it seems truth must be for
everyone. I find I don’t speak from my truth most of the day. I mostly speak to what I think others
want to hear. I watch many other people do this too. I am not very good at truth, since I have been
in lies for a while, and my parents and children are good liars. Lying is everywhere. How does one get
past all this lying to truly see if there are other archetypes that want to be addressed?
A: Thank you for your question. Well, one day you will just have had enough of lies. And you will
just stop lying. You will just stop, because nothing else makes sense. When you’ve had enough, you
will just stop the lies. And you will start telling the truth. And it will change everything. And it will
set your life free. And you will wonder what took you so long. And you won’t have an answer. And
you will be happy.

Without Resistance, the Next Door Opens

Q: I seem to have lost my soul values! Since early childhood, I had an intimate relationship with
God. For over thirty-five years, I read the Bible daily, communed with God, and had only one
desire: to know and live the “will of God.” Seven or eight years ago, I had some deep moments of
awakening. There was only peace, and the notion of God as “somewhere out there” disappeared.
But then my life began to collapse. I have had health issues since I was a child. During the last few
years, my health got much, much worse. As a result, I lost my job, my home, and my friends. I
had to move back to live with my parents to be supported by them. I can no longer find any deep
purpose. I feel let down by God/the Universe, and don’t know “whom” or “what” to trust. My only
desire is to be healthy and without physical pain. I cannot even say I have a desire to know God or
know myself (my Self ).
The reason I am in this course is that I can’t keep living like this. I am missing something profound,
although I find myself resisting every moment and glimpse of peace and joy. I feel that the last few
years have traumatized me so much that I now hate my lifelong soul values (“God,” The will of God,
love, gentleness, compassion, truth, etc.). Perhaps I am missing a “savior,” but I cannot resurrect my
old beliefs either. I have been to therapy and I have sat in meditation and stillness. I miss knowing
what I seemed to have had—something to dedicate my life to.
A: When you finally find the willingness to let go of resisting your condition, as challenging as it
is, something completely unexpected will open up within you. You are trying to go back, to some
extent, but there is no going back, only forward. As you let go of arguing with what is, you will move
forward and new doors will open. I’ve watched hundreds of people go through their own version of
what you are going through. They too finally just stop resisting, and the next door opens. Or they
don’t, and well . . . they don’t.
Surrendering to what is, is the name of the game—heartfelt, honest, humble surrender.
The ego just must let go!

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The Whole World Benefits
Q: When considering my soul value, what came to me was depth, then aliveness, then connection.
Depth and aliveness and connection—are these three soul values?
A: Now put these values into action. Act from within the state of connectedness, aliveness, and
depth. Embody them, literally. Be what you love, always.
And the whole world benefits.

All of Life Deserves Our Utmost Care

Q: After Session 1, I woke up the next morning realizing that I treat and consider my spiritual life
very differently from my worldly life. I regard all of my spiritual life, experiences, and insights as
a treasure that I honor beyond what words could ever express. On the other hand, I consider my
worldly life with all its messiness, pain, disappointments, joys, and stresses as basically the “bastard
at the family picnic.” I don’t treat it with even close to the great respect and joy and honor with
which I treat my spiritual life. When you talked about the spiritual and worldly as two sides of the
same life, I realized I should probably be regarding my worldly life with the same honor and respect
and treasuring as my spiritual life, regardless of what it’s like. Am I off base here? Is that the correct
perspective?
A: I do believe you’re getting the point. Spiritual life and daily life are mere concepts. There is only
life—all one seamless expression of being. The more one’s spiritual realization deepens, the more
the so-called spiritual and daily lives come together as one life. The life of activity shows us just how
deep and embodied our realization is. It drives our realization to completion. All of life deserves our
utmost attention and care.

What Is the True Form of Emptiness?

Q: Emptiness is the deepest truth that I know, because in each moment it allows the most beneficial
soul value to manifest in my life. What are your thoughts about this?
A: If you were here in front of me, I’d ask you to show me this emptiness without using any words.
What is the true form of emptiness?
Show me the emptiness of the ground underfoot.
Say one true empty word.

Where Our Action Is Coming From

Q: The adventure of manifesting is not about what you are doing, but rather where you are doing it
from. I’d have to say one of my core soul values is integrity.
A: It is so very important to focus on the state of being our action is coming from. Then the action
itself becomes clear from within the being of integrity, truth, love, peace, service, etc. Be love, then
you’ll naturally do love. Be truth, then you’ll naturally be truthful.

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No Reference Becomes the New Reference
Q: I have a question on how to handle losing point of reference. I have experienced the convergence
of the one presence all around me and the human one, with my awareness focused more on the space
in and around me. This is a strange experience to have when I am driving. It has been helpful but
requires deep trust. I find my mind grasping at listening to stories, just to have a point of reference.
At other times, I am okay just being and becoming with what is in front of me, and then that
becomes my reference.
A: No reference becomes the new reference.
When there is no center, everything, everywhere is your reference.
Nothing is everything, always!

No-Self Is Everything-Everywhere-Everywhen
Q: Is stillness the absence of thoughts, or is stillness the awareness within which thoughts appear
and disappear without encountering resistance?
Years ago, before I learned to meditate, I spontaneously experienced the shift in identity. Now,
despite much practice, the brain still fires thought-impulses when meditating (not to mention at
other times as well). This usually doesn’t bother me because thoughts are just thoughts—until I
believe them, which happens often enough. The knowing of the undivided, however, can’t be erased.
I understand this knowing awareness to be stillness. Am I missing something?
A: I’d say you are on the mark. Thank you for your question. Now let go and let stillness move and
act and relate. Stillness is the state of no resistance, and ultimately no-self. And no-self is Buddha, as
everything-everywhere-everywhen. No exceptions!

Butterfly-Happy Soul Values

Q: When I was a child I was lucky enough to be struck by “golden moments”—flashes of something
bigger than what I perceived the second before. These moments were filled with truth, love, freedom,
openness, and (most importantly for a little kid in a shaky world) okayness. I felt that everything was
going to be okay and actually already was okay, even if it didn’t seem like it and the grownups around
me didn’t see it.
These moments didn’t last long, but they transformed my view of life. I came to know them as
“butterfly-happy” and I wanted everyone in the world to feel it and “have” it. In the last couple of
years, I lost the term, but not the intention. I attempted to trade it for something that sounded more
mature, but I ended up getting quite stuck.
When you gave us this week’s homework assignment, I was thrown into “uh-oh,” because I’ve
struggled since reading The Way of Liberation with the questions you posed: “What do you value
most? What is this really about for you?” I feel I should be able to say, “Truth!” “Love!” “Integrity!”
“Peace!” But instead, I sat with blank paper. yesterday morning, and all day, except for writing the
question out once or twice.
When I woke up this morning, I asked it again as I sat and listened to the rain. And then it came
back, and I smiled. It’s always been about butterfly-happy, and there’s no getting away from it. It’s

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about living from that place, even when it’s hard and seems far from “happy”—the simplicity, truth,
love, aliveness, freedom, integrity, unity, independence, magic, reality, flow, grounding, being, gift,
and grace of it. I still want everyone and everything in the world to experience it, however they do,
and be able to express it and live it myself. This was my first step, letting myself write the words to
you.
A: Thank you for your story and your question within it. Your story of experiencing the butterfly-
happy is actually a great example of discovering a soul value. Ideally we find our deepest value from
within our deepest experience of being. For you it is butterfly-happy. The wording need not sound
complicated or profound, only authentic and true for you.
Part of this practice is to embody in your actions your deepest value. We are turning deep experience
into action in the world of daily life. So you can talk from butterfly-happy, relate from butterfly-
happy, solve problems from butterfly-happy, serve others from butterfly-happy, etc. This is not some
idealistic endeavor—it is embodied, practical, and transformative spiritual practice. It is a gift to the
world, your own true being.

Avoiding Conflict Creates Conflict

Q: My question is about how absolute values can seem to be distorted when I attempt to manifest
them. A value that came up for me after Session 1 was peace, but I can see that in life, peace often
translates into something like avoiding conflict, which isn’t always helpful. Could you say something
more about manifesting these values from a deeper, more whole place?
A: Thank you for your insightful question. It can be tricky working with any of the soul values.
As you intend to act from the value of peace, for example, you are delving into two fathomless
questions. The first question is “What is peace?” As you mentioned, we will often find and work
through some old and conditioned ideas of what peace is. It is common to have the idea of peace
mixed up with an uncomfortable avoidance of conflict. When you inquire deeply into this sort of
pattern, it becomes obvious that acting from an uncomfortable avoidance of conflict tends to itself
create conflict. So you will need to investigate your conditioned ideas of peace and find out how they
create fear and separation.
The second question has to do with what authentic peaceful action is. As we examine what truly
peaceful action is, we come to see that peaceful action often requires great clarity, love, and courage.
To embody peace is not to protect one’s inner state; it is to courageously act from an internal gravitas
and stability. It is to love from a wise and open state of being. As you investigate these two questions,
you come to find that there are no fixed and final answers, but rather an endless opening to the truth
and expression of peace. The more peace that you embody in your actions, the more peace you feel.

The Impact of Trauma on Exploring Soul Values

Q: I come from a history of trauma and organized abuse that resulted in strong, conditioned,
negative beliefs that have followed me throughout much of my life. I have done many years of
trauma recovery, but even though there is awareness of where these beliefs come from, they still
impact my life. If I attach to them, I am pulled into depression.
As I explore the soul values that are meaningful and what I care deeply about, fear arises strongly and

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I feel vulnerable and transparent. I am wondering if this speaks to a lack of trust in my just being and
in the world. I find that the fear keeps me at a distance from even the idea of practicing, although
there is also a subtle knowing that these values exist deep within. Can you speak to how I can begin
to trust this knowing and manifest my soul values in my practice and in life?
A: I understand that, given your past, embracing a soul value may bring up fear for you. To embody
truth and love is to embody a kind of empowerment. Many life traumas occur around the issue of
power—power being exerted unskillfully upon you, and/or your own inherent power being denied or
punished. This sets up challenging associations around being empowered and feeling safe within your
own power.
My suggestion is to choose a soul value that resonates with you the most. Then start by meditating
upon it by letting yourself feel that value within your body. Feel love, or truth, or compassion, or
clarity, or service. Feel the energy of your chosen value in your body. Let your body get accustomed
to the feel of it. You see, each soul value is a sort of energy or empowerment. Let your body feel
the empowerment of your chosen soul value. Let it feel that it is a safe thing to feel in current time.
Meditate on it.
Then start to embody and act on that value, beginning with simple actions like walking. How does
the body hold itself when it embodies love or truth? What is the posture of it? Then choose another
action like driving, asking the same questions, and feel how the body responds. Do this with different
activities until you get very familiar with the soul value’s energy in the body. This will help you feel
safe and strong, and feel the inherent empowerment of the value that you have chosen. Only then
will you endeavor to embody and act on it in a moment of relationship. But practice with people and
in situations that feel trusted and safe for you to start with. With experience, your fear will begin to
be replaced with embodied confidence. Just take it slow and easy—no need to rush into anything.

Embodying Truth, Love, and Honesty at Work

Q: Should I uphold my soul values when there could be great external threat, such as losing my job?
My boss’s managerial style is authoritarian at times, and he might see my truth as a threat to him and
his ways. He also holds onto things and uses them against me later. I value the experience I get from
my current job and thus have effectively sacrificed my soul values to keep it at times.
A: The larger question regarding your job is “Do you have to sacrifice your soul (your true being) to
do your job?” I understand your need to have a job and make money, but if you really feel that you
need to sacrifice your soul to do your job, it’s time to check in with what you value and ask if there
are any alternatives for you to exercise, either at your current job or by looking for a new one.
We all spend at least one-third of our lives at work, and it’s important that what we do should not be
in direct conflict with our own integrity and deepest values. Otherwise, we will be divided at our very
core. This may not be an easy thing to contemplate, but I feel that it is of great importance.
Without be overly idealistic about it, it may be good to reflect on whether or not your current job
situation and atmosphere are inherently healthy. A job need not be perfect, but I feel as though
it should feel basically healthy for you and be a place where you do not have to compromise your
integrity. We each have to question whether or not we ourselves are manifesting soul values at work,
whether we are manifesting sanity and understanding, and what our impact on others is. These are

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exactly the types of questions and challenges that we all face when seeking to embody truth, honesty,
and love.

Be True to Your Own Truth

Q: I have a question about the exercise of speaking only the truth.
How important is keeping silent in conversations because we cannot know what is “right” regarding
someone else’s experience, compared to the courage it takes to speak our relative truth?
My default is, If in doubt, don’t speak. But this feels like a quasi-spiritual belief adopted by the
superego in order to keep me “safe” from the fear of what others think of me.
A: Our job is to know what is true and right for us. What is true and right for others is their job. Be
true to the truth as you currently perceive it, while also letting others have their truths. This requires
a very open mind, as well as a mind that is not fixated in its views to the extent of not really listening
to what others have to say.
I could put it more simply: always be true (honest) and listen deeply. Have an open and honest
mind, and an open and courageous heart. Now, that’s something worth embodying!

Which Soul Value Should I Choose?

Q: In trying to answer the question of what self-transcendent value is meaningful enough to
dedicate my life to, I find that I can’t make a choice. Truth, love, peace, freedom, authenticity,
honesty, stillness, and space are all so important! Looking at them, I can see how they are all
intertwined. But instead of thinking, “So it doesn’t really matter which one I choose; they will come
together anyway,” I get stuck and feel unable to pick one at all. This seems to happen more often in
my life, as if the bigger picture freezes me.
A: When choosing a soul value to work with, just pick the one that you are most drawn to. Don’t
worry about choosing the right one, or the correct one. You’re just picking a soul value to get started.
You can always experiment with another one a week later. The whole point is just to start working
with any one of them. It’s not necessarily your final choice. As you work with one, you will know
pretty quickly whether or not it is the best one for you. Choose the one that interests you the most.
Later you may get more clear about which soul value is reflective of what you deeply value.

Breaking the Addiction to Egocentric Orientation

Q: I have been struggling for a few weeks with something that I think directly ties in to what
you are trying to teach us in this course. I very much resonated with what you were saying about
translating one’s deeper experience of being into action, and I really want my life to be an expression
of that.
Ever since I was a little girl, I have been drawn to the value of truth more than anything, and I have
oriented my life around that simply because it seems that there is no other choice if I want to feel
truly alive. I feel wedded to truth because devoting myself to it has always served my highest interests.
Even suffering for truth has grown and transformed me in many ways, for which I am profoundly
grateful. As such, I want to embody and live out this value of truth as much as possible.

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Alongside of this, over the past few weeks, I have recognized more deeply than ever before that I am
propelled by an addictive sort of energy. I feel addicted to the next moment and have discovered
that there is a perpetual energetic experience of leaning into the next moment—a moment which is
presumed to hold more potential, fulfillment, or stimulation than this one. I now look back at my
life and see that this dynamic has been playing out nearly continuously as long as I can remember.
And so it seems that in a very subtle way, I have been operating like an addict my whole life.
The problem is that in spite of seeing this, I am still having a difficult time slowing down and coming
into the experience of this moment rather than leaning energetically into the next moment. I have
also been avoiding meditation completely, despite some part of me really wanting to meditate.
It seems that one of the things you are pointing us toward in this course is a unified experience of
oneself and life in this moment, and that is exactly the energetic orientation that I am being called
back to. Can you offer any pointers on how I can get myself unhooked from this chaotic addictive
state that I have discovered within myself, so that I can rest more in the present and more fully
embody the truth?
A: The egocentric orientation is forever dissatisfied and anticipating the next moment, hoping that it
will bring something better. This is the vicious circular delusion that the egocentric mind is addicted
to. Of course, the question is how to break the addiction.
Like all forms of addiction, the addiction to the egocentric orientation is kept in place through
denial, primarily denial of exactly how dissatisfying and destructive it is. Can you see this without
guilt or judgment? Rather, just face the ego-addicted condition in all its horror. Just see it, not only
within yourself but in the world all around you: a whole world filled with human beings constantly
dissatisfied and struggling toward a future that promises relief but never ultimately delivers.
What begins to break the addiction to the imagined future is profound dissatisfaction and a
willingness to take full responsibility for one’s own life—not blame, but responsibility. We just stop
colluding with illusion, not because we should, but because we are done with feeding it. We are done
with indulging and supporting the cause of suffering. We are done with it because we do in fact care,
we do in fact love, and we begin to act on the care and love. See your spiritual practice as an act of
love, both for yourself and for all beings.

How Is Love Related to Truth?

Q: I have recently been reflecting on two questions in connection with soul values: What is worth
living for? And what is worth dying for? My responses were love and truth respectively.
I have been quite aware of truth as a value my whole life. But the realization of love as a value is a
recent one that came from a transcendental experience I had earlier this year, which was felt as a
powerful heart opening. Truth is very clear, but love is a highly misunderstood word and difficult
to explain adequately. To me, love is where one lives from a state which is directly connected to the
truth of the heart.
Love seems to me to manifest in many different ways. In my meditative inquiry, from my direct
experience, it has a freedom aspect, which manifests as allowing. It fully accepts what is, sees no
separation, and understands that everything is perfect.

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It seems to me that truth and love are actually very closely related or are even two sides of the
same coin. I wonder if this is because in absolute reality, which is unconditioned, everything is not
separated into different concepts the way it is in the world of conditioned thinking. In absolute
reality, all is one. Can you please comment on what love is and how it is related to truth?
You mentioned in Session 1 that you also have love and truth as your soul values. I wonder if you
could give a daily example of how these manifest in your life, so that I can more clearly appreciate
this process of manifestation and what could be missing in my space.
A: As you suggested, truth and love go together like the front and back of your hand. In fact,
ultimately, all of the soul values originate and arise directly from the ground of one’s being. This is so
very important to understand, because we are not trying to impose an idea upon ourselves from the
top down. Rather, we are recognizing these values as arising from deep within our being. They rise up
from our own ground, and are intimate expressions of that ground. So we are not imposing an idea
of a soul value upon ourselves; we are instead connecting with something that is intimately present
within us, and bringing it forth into our relative lives more fully.
Ultimately, all true soul values arise from the ground of being, and each soul value is connected to
and reflects all of the other soul values. Take the soul value of love, for example. At the level of soul,
love is a reflection of the truth of interconnectedness. So love and truth actually go together. There
is no true love where there is deception, hatred, or absolute separation. Furthermore, both love and
truth will require courage and understanding at times. So love, truth, courage, and understanding are
reflective of one another as soul values.
I could continue to show how other soul values connect to love, but it would become redundant.
Suffice to say that each soul value contains all of the others and arises as a relative expression of the
ground of our being—meaning that they need not be imposed from the top down, but instead rise
up from their own depth and inform the relative expression of our humanity.
As a simple example, love implies an open mind and open heart. We can ask ourselves at any
moment, “Am I open minded and open hearted right now?” And if you find that you are not, then
relax your mind, and be more intimately present. Move from the false certainty of the known (I
know) to the more open state of the unknown (I’m available and present).
Just a small shift in your inner orientation can transform and redeem the moment, meaning to return
it to its natural condition. Thus we can participate in being a redeeming presence in the world. We
can manifest truth and love in a very direct and practical way. Then the inner becomes the outer, and
the outer becomes the inner.

Selflessness as a Soul Value

Q: An answer came to me that my soul value might be selflessness in two domains. One is the literal
sense of no-self, which I experienced in my awakenings as the ultimate truth. The other is a more
human workable domain, in the sense of love or union as expressions of that ultimate truth.
But when you asked to think about the one thing I can do today to express this value in my life,
I felt a little bit disoriented. Can you please help me to clarify how I can incorporate the value of
selflessness as a commitment in my daily life?

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Could it be that simply remembering the truth of no-self continuously will enable the transcendental
domain to inform and orient everything I do in the human domain? And is this daily commitment
the key you are suggesting for living the true meaning of “taking the one seat”?
A: As your experience testifies to, selflessness is an aspect of transcendent realization. And although
it may not at first seem to be a clear soul value, it actually is. Selflessness is both a direct experience
of being, and a deep soul value. When we look deeply into the experience of selflessness, we see that
clarity and love are aspects of selflessness.
Remember that in this practice, you are translating deep and often transcendent experience down
into the relative domain. The key to this practice is to experiment with embodying the soul value that
seems the very best for you as well as for others around you. The willingness to experiment, to try
new ways of manifesting and embodying our depth, requires some creativity and willingness to fail at
times.
Take selflessness as your soul value to begin with, and ask yourself little questions like “What if I
endeavored to let go of any fixated self-position during my next conversation, while at the same time
being clear and secure?” Or “How much or how little self-orientation do I need while doing the next
task, or talking to the next person I talk to?”
Notice during the day how much more open and loving you feel when you are not focused on self.
What would it feel like to be strong and selfless at the same time? And how could you manifest that
at least once each day?
These short questions are prompts to evoke the value and quality of being that you choose. Never try
to impose an idea or an ideal of your chosen value. That will just lead to failure. Instead, make the
whole endeavor into one of constant discovery, experimentation and, dare I say, fun.
Remember you are endeavoring to embody what you yourself feel to be the highest value to you.
It’s an adventure into the unknown. It’s not about perfection; it’s about discovery and beginning to
orient yourself toward the best possible life for you and all beings. What could be better than that!

Manifesting What You Love and Cherish

Q: My understanding from your talk in Session 1 is that the most meaningful soul value we want to
clarify is both something that we inherently embody and the quality we value most from our deepest
spiritual experiences.
What if the most meaningful value from our deepest spiritual experience is not one we naturally
embody in the relative world, but rather something we have struggled with? Should we choose that
“challenge” to dedicate our life to, or should it be a value that comes more naturally?
My natural/adaptive soul values are strength, courage, generosity, and honesty. My deepest spiritual
experiences are of love, oneness, and unity. Perhaps because of my experience of the relative world,
love does not flow easily for me (although those same experiences have helped me build strength and
courage). And although I believe love is my highest value and would be worth dedicating my life to, I
also think it would be the most difficult. There is a part of me that feels like I would be setting myself
up to fail consistently, whereas if I chose courage or strength, I would be likely to “succeed” more
often.

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A: Let me start by making a clarification that might help. The soul value that you choose to work
with doesn’t necessarily have to be a value that you feel that you inherently embody. It needs to be a
value that reflects what is most important to you in life.
Whatever we hold as valuable will be deeply related to our whole life experience, positive experiences
as well as challenging ones. Sometimes the most challenging aspects of life help us to get clear about
what it is that we truly value, and sometimes positive experiences of spiritual opening help us to hone
in on what is ultimately important in life. So you can draw on your entire life experience to help you
get clear on what soul values are the most important to you.
Your greatest soul value may come very naturally to you, or it may be very challenging for you
to embody. Pick the one or two that are most important to you, irrespective of whether they feel
challenging to you or not. When you begin to work with one of the soul values, you will begin to see
that each value actually contains all of the others to some extent. This is because each soul value is a
reflection of your true being, and at the core of being, all is essentially one.
Please understand that you are not trying to be perfect. Aiming at perfection is an act of the parental
superego and will only set you up to fail. You are not trying to be perfect or conform to an ideal; you
are aiming at being authentic and sincere. See it as an adventure of discovery rather than as a goal.
You are just experimenting with expressing your soul value a little more in your daily life.
This is a practice of expressing and manifesting soul—your true, unified, and loving nature. It’s a
practice of getting what’s deep inside of you, your true nature, into your day-to-day life. Essentially
you are manifesting what you love and cherish. You are embodying who you truly are.

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WEEK TWO
Notes from Adyashanti
The secret to happiness is to wholeheartedly respond to a call from the heart which is greater than oneself.
Soul Values - Reflective of the most evolved state of consciousness, i.e., enlightenment. They are
translations of the enlightened state into relative human values. They are timeless enlightenment
expressed in human terms. Examples of soul values are truth, honesty, love, peace, courage, unity,
freedom, service, etc.
In this teaching, the absolute, or ground of being, is not in and of itself enlightenment. The
enlightened condition is to perceive no fundamental difference between the absolute and the relative.
All polarities are transcended in the enlightened condition. Everything everywhere is the face of God.
And this way of seeing and experiencing life is itself ultimate meaning—not a philosophical meaning,
but the experience of meaning. It is the experience that feels as though you are in the right place, at
the right time, doing the right thing. Align yourself with the Tao (reality) of every moment, and the
light of meaning will mysteriously shine forth.
The first fundamental life question is “Who am I?” - That’s the question that orients you toward
awakening. The next step in discovering who you are is to find out who and what your life serves.
The second fundamental question is “What have I committed my life to serving?” Stated
another way it is “What self-transcending values am I devoted to manifesting in my life?” - This
self-transcending question is what orients you toward the embodiment of realization. In order to
live a happy, meaningful and awakened life, you must be oriented toward life commitments that
are reflective of self-transcending values. Such commitments are enlightened obligations worthy
of orienting your life around for the benefit of all beings. They are commitments reflective of your
most evolved state of consciousness, as well as the means of embodying that state in time and space.
They are not ideals that you strive to live by as much as they are inherent qualities of being that you
commit yourself to embodying.
The idea is not to try to impose soul values upon yourself. It is being devoted to embodying
your truest and most meaningful state of being. Soul values are bridges between the realized state
of selflessness and non-separation, and one’s human nature. They are means of expressing the
enlightened state in space and time.
Focus on committing all of your life to the expression of your soul values, and what you should
be doing will become more obvious. - When what you do and how you do it is informed by your
deepest experience of truth and love, your life will be perfumed with a deep and abiding sense of
meaning. Begin by bringing your deepest sense of truth and love to everything you do and the door
to what to do will begin to open. Make every what (you do) an expression of how (the truth and love
that you bring to it). Then the door to the next most obvious thing to do will become clear.
How exercising intention leads to informed spontaneity - While it is true that when we are
completely abiding in (in the sense of being) our true nature, actions and decisions happen
spontaneously and largely without premeditated intention, it is also true that very few people
are completely and absolutely abiding in their true nature (as spirit) all of the time. It is also true

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that exercising intention, which is ultimately what any spiritual practice is doing, can itself be an
expression of true nature. A true spiritual practice is both a means to evoke realization as well as
an expression of realization. All of The Way of Liberation teachings are meant to evoke, and be an
expression of one’s true nature.
Much like a musician needs to practice before they can spontaneously improvise great music, we
need to exercise our true nature in an intentional way; otherwise we might just be improvising chaos
and confusion while imagining that we are expressing the truth of our being. We must never confuse
spontaneity with mere egocentric impulsiveness. For when we are acting in a truly enlightened and
spontaneous way, we are spontaneously drawing upon a lifetime of experience, the entire gestalt of
the moment, as well as the transcendent ground of being.
All of this is unselfconsciously informing and expressing itself in whatever actions are unfolding when
we are in a clear and awakened condition. Such actions are neither right nor wrong; rather, they hit
the mark, in the same way as an archer’s arrow hits the bull’s-eye when her shot is perfectly executed.
Enlightened action hits the mark of the moment, and if and when everything is clear, it happens
spontaneously. When it is not quite so clear, we can exercise our intention to embody the soul values.
They are bridges between the egocentric and the selflessly awakened mode of being. As these bridges
become ingrained into our being over time, they begin to function more and more spontaneously.
They provide pathways of connection between the dualistic and nondualistic dimensions of our
being.
The whole idea is to be more and more able to spontaneously manifest our true nature in a clear
and dynamic way in our daily lives. Paradoxically, exercising our true nature in an intentional (yet
relaxed) way provides the ground from which truly enlightened action spontaneously arises in our
daily lives. For we are not so much trying to manufacture an enlightened way of being as we are
endeavoring to uncover and realize an enlightened and meaningful way of being in our daily lives.
Exercising the intention to embody meaningful soul values challenges us to be in our actions, what
we are in the depth of our being. For as the old saying goes, “To know and not to be is not yet to
fully know.” In this practice we are closing the gap between knowing and being.
Emptying out the gap - Even after someone has had a genuine spiritual awakening it is common
at some point for the egocentric me to reemerge to some extent. The egocentric me creates, and
actually is, a gap between your ego and your true nature. The egocentric me is essentially the feeling
of separation and contraction. It creates the experience of separation by both attaching to itself
(conditioned ideas, beliefs, and opinions) and aversion to what it perceives as other than itself. This
push-pull of attachment and aversion creates the felt sense of a gap between you and life, you and
your true nature, you and what could or should be.
Wisely working with embodying the soul values will empty out and close this perceived gap of
separation. They connect your relative functioning in the world with your true nature, and close the
gap between the two. No gap is the experience of having no psychological division, and no separation
between your functioning in the relative world and the ground of your being. It is the ultimate
collapse of the inner and the outer into what the Buddha called suchness, or thusness, the actual
indescribable what-is-ness of reality. And only that is timeless and sacred and real.
Meaning - The experience of being in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. It is the

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feeling of being in alignment, focused, and in harmony. It is the experience of your human life being
in alignment with the cosmos. Of course it always is in alignment, for the simple reason that you
are an expression and an extension of the cosmos. But the more confused you are, the less you will
experience this at-one-ment with the cosmos, and you will cease to experience life as meaningful and
sacred. To experience at-one-ment with the cosmos is itself the greatest experience of meaning.
Meaning is neither an idea nor an ideal imposed upon life. - It is the experience of being
internally undivided and aligned with soul (one’s true nature) in whatever you are doing. Meaning
and purpose are not derived primarily through what you are doing but rather through the state of
being that you are in. The primary question is “Are you in a meaningful and purposeful state of
being?”
When you are in a meaningful and purposeful state of being, you will have greater access to what it is
that you should be doing.
Meaningful (enlightened) action flows forth from undivided being and is an expression of
being. - We are conditioned to think that meaning and purpose are derived exclusively by what we
are doing. However, authentic meaning and purpose are derived predominately from our state or
condition of being, as well as by our self-transcending commitments to life.
Meaning is an experience or condition of being. It is something you feel and experience. There is
no inherently meaningful or meaningless activity. An action is simply an action. Meaning is an
experience that we bring to an activity. It originates in us, not in the activity itself. Meaning or the lack
of meaning is a reflection of our state of being as well as our relationship to whatever it is that we
are doing. We either light up our actions and activities with meaning and significance, or we darken
them with thought-created meaninglessness.
Spiritual autonomy - To be a simple force of nature, a selfless and creative expression of the whole,
possessing an independence of spirit capable of manifesting the enlightened condition in daily living
for the highest possible good—a momentary breeze, here then gone, and nothing more.
To take the one seat - To claim absolute responsibility for your life, to take your place in your
incarnation by consenting to occupy your human life, to fully embody your aloneness as well as your
universal connection to all beings. It is to stop lying and claim your freedom, and be your loving
heart, and commit yourself to inherently self-transcending values, and never make excuses.

Session 2 Notes
Translating Soul Values into Your Humanness
• The teachings given here are meant not to just give you information but to evoke your own
depth and your true nature.
• Even when we have an experience of awakening, it’s not always obvious how it translates into
our relative life.
• Your soul values are inherent in the ground of your being. They translate the awakened
state into relative consciousness, into a tangible, human context.
• Soul values give shape and form to your life.

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 • The awakened state can manifest spontaneously, but it is rare to have the body, mind, and spirit
be completely aligned after awakening. Usually the transformation is a process.

Spiritual Autonomy and Taking Responsibility

• Spiritual autonomy is a force of nature. It is not a gift but is usually hard won. You must dig
deep to find and express it.
• Spiritual autonomy is a selfless and creative expression of the whole, possessing an
independence of spirit capable of manifesting the enlightened condition in daily living for
the highest possible good.
• The seeming paradox is that one sees the wholeness of life and its sameness, while also seeing the
unique expressions of life.
• The expression “Taking the one seat” comes from an old Zen koan. It is about finding and
developing spiritual autonomy. You must take absolute responsibility for your life, for your state
of being, mind, and consciousness.
• From a conditioned mindset, we think that everything around us influences and is part of our
state of being.
• Taking real responsibility for your life is realizing and acting from the understanding that your
life is derived from you and how you relate to each moment. This responsibility is the key to
your freedom. Without it, you are in a psychological state of victimhood where you believe that
other people and situations are responsible for your state of being.
• There is no freedom or possibility of freedom if you believe that exterior events are the cause of
your experience.
• How you relate to the moment is 98% of the cause of your suffering. Deep awakening is
the awakening to this illusion. Then you have options and you can change your way of
relating.
• Taking the one seat is about taking responsibility for your incarnation and saying yes to your
life.

The Two Sides of Oneness

• Taking the one seat is to fully embody your aloneness.
• Oneness has two sides:
1. The fullness of being, which is the ground of all things.
2. The experience of aloneness—not loneliness—which is the quality of being. You must go
through your aloneness to run into the connectedness of all existence.
• Reality is always bringing polarities together.
• You claim your freedom by your relationship to the moment and by embracing your loving
connectedness to all things.

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Self-Transcending Values Orient You
• Your life is being organized around self-transcending values, either consciously,
intentionally, or spontaneously.
• When you take the one seat, your life is organized around self-transcending values such as truth,
peace, connectedness, service, and love.
• When your values are not self-transcending, they are not wrong—they are just limited.
• The nature of enlightenment itself is a self-transcending view.

Two Fundamental Spiritual Questions

• Spirituality consists of two fundamental questions:
1. Who or what am I? The “me” thinks that all life is oriented around itself. It takes
maturity to question this belief. What is this thing I call “me”? That question is getting
right to the heart of the matter. It’s the question before all other questions.
2. What have I committed my life to serving? If you want to experience happiness, much
less embody the depth of spiritual realization, this question becomes absolutely vital.
This question seems odd to many who think about what they can receive from life rather
than how to serve it. Even if you haven’t thought about this, your life will still be oriented
around a value (even if the value is greed or ambition). When you bring consciousness to
this choice, you bring more freedom to it.
• In order to embody your realization, you must see your values.
• When you bring more consciousness to something, you bring more freedom to it.
• The overwhelming majority of people are in the process of becoming conscious of the values
they serve.
• Taking responsibility for your life is always taking responsibility for what your life is oriented
around, toward what you serve. What is important enough to sacrifice for?

Waking Up from the Fiction of “Me”

• Any experience that goes in the direction of the ground of your being allows you to see the
connectedness of life.
• You can wake up from the dream of limited selfhood. Behind all the images and memories,
there isn’t a separate little “me” there that they pertain to. You can see that the separate
“me” is a fiction in the mind.
• When you wake up from that dream, and your view connects with something beyond, it is both
bigger in it connectedness, and less in its emptiness of being. This revelation can completely
reorient your relationship to life and being.
• The act of trying to stay in deep experiences is limited because it is a self-referential mode of
being.

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Meaning and Purpose in Action
• Soul values all seem to come together at some point because they are all portals to one’s true
nature. Don’t get too hung up on trying to find the right value; just choose the one that seems
the most relevant to you now.
• What are you committed to serving?
• Meaning and purpose are not what you are doing—which is just an action—but are the
state of being that you bring to what you do; it is not about what you do but how you do it.
• What you bring to an activity is what is beautiful and significant, whether that activity is grand
or totally mundane.
• How you do an action confers blessing and beauty; it is an expression of your deepest taking of
the one seat.
• Mindfulness is not just about paying attention and being present—it’s to bring beauty, peace,
and truth to your actions in its deeper dimension. It’s to be serving whatever activity you’re
involved in.
• Soul values bridge the gap between the truth of your being and the ways you are in the world.

Occupying Your Life

• Completely consent to this moment. Try it several times a day, such as walking down the street
or talking to someone.
• The ego values something other than truth, peace, freedom, and unity, but the deeper part of
you resonates to these values.
• Notice how your relationship to what is happening in the moment dictates your experience.
Your freedom is in your hands.
• Spiritual autonomy requires you to orient around the depth of your being, not by
imposing nice ideals, but by recognizing that your soul values are innate. Recognize them
from the inside and let them occupy the space of your being.
• The egoic orientation is often in conflict with this occupation because it wants to remain at the
center. This orientation doesn’t lead to happiness.
• Love and wisdom meet in your heart.
• An enlightened being is someone who is oriented around, and is embodying, soul values—not
that they do this with perfection, but they do it with intention and integrity. Perfection is about
the most imperfect idea that human beings came up with.

Caller #1: The Spontaneous Expression of Soul Values

• Soul values are bridges to our true nature. They create a background that can be drawn upon,
similar to the way jazz musicians can let go into spontaneous music because they draw upon a
background of rigorous practice.
• Seeing the truth beyond conventional meaning can leave you in a dry place where you can get

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 stuck in the emptiness of the empty state. This is a transitional state where the deeper meaning
isn’t fully functional yet. Soul values are the bridge.
• When you completely commit to something, you lose yourself in it and it feels timeless and
sacred.
• If something arises as a thought, it can come from different sources such as a conditioned
view, an anxiety, or a spontaneous expression of your true nature.
• If you are using doership (relative means) to connect you to true nature, it is not the same as
spontaneity, but you’re creating a practice to allow spontaneity to manifest.
• Spontaneity of being is also working with intention to create the ground for it to eventually
happen.

Caller #2: Finding Your Own Words for Soul Values

• For some people, words like “commitment” and “courage” may seem too heavy or scary. Words
such as “willing” or “allowing” might feel truer.
• You are encouraged to find your own words that speak most deeply to your soul values.

Caller #3: Operating from Your Light

• You can have impulses to bring light or darkness into your relationships with others and your
environment.
• Keep coming back to your heart and your deeper being, not as an imposition on yourself but as
a reference to your own honesty and truthfulness.
• If you operate from your highest being, people will notice. You will be holding up a mirror for
them to see themselves.
• When you bring your best to the moment, you tend to encourage the better nature of
others.
• Always align with your wise response. It is not necessary to put up with everything. Sometimes
boundaries are necessary and sometimes they aren’t.
• Responding from your true nature isn’t always easy; it requires commitment and sacrifice to
encourage your own growth and the growth of those around you.
• Start with the little things and observe the internal feedback that feels good.

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Supplemental Teaching 2:
Week 2 Exercise:
Living Your Highest Meaning & Pivot Points in Conversation
Written Practice
In the written exercises, try to be as succinct as you can. When we are brief, we are actually the most
clear and powerful—it pulls the most clarity from you.
• What is the primary challenge I would have to embrace in order to act out my chosen life
meaning?
• How might living my highest meaning affect the lives of those closest to me in a positive way?
• How might living my highest meaning affect the world in a positive way?

Daily Practice
• There are many choice points in any conversation where you are consciously or unconsciously
choosing which direction that conversation goes in. What you hold as most valuable will dictate
the choices you’re making.
• “Turning points” are little moments of choice when you choose to pivot an interaction with
someone towards understanding and peace. Peace doesn’t always need to be your intention
behind any conversation; we’re just noticing that in any given conversation, there are these little
moments where it could go one way or the other.
• Look each day, in as many conversations you can, where these little pivot points of choice are
occurring in your conversation. See what happens if you start to choose truth, understanding,
or peace to be some of the highest values you have? When you do, you might notice that you’re
making different choices as to what you say and how you say it.
• As part of this exercise:
• Give voice to what the other needs you to understand and acknowledge.
• Seek to understand first, then to be understood.
• Be truthful about you, and leave others to be truthful about them.

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Week 2 Q&A
The Doing of Non-Doing
Q: The past few years have been a continual letting go of beliefs and an ever-deepening awareness of
this indescribable existence. I am seeing more and more that I am not this idea of myself and having
deeper and deeper experiences of being this peaceful, loving presence that seems to be the ground of
all of existence.
I see so clearly that there is no separate “me.” Still the mind creates the separate me, and sometimes
I am aware of it and sometimes not. When I have moments of just being this vast, empty, silent
presence, there isn’t a “me” being this presence; the presence is being everything.
Can the practice of being the peace and love reinforce the story of a separate me? It feels like the
truth as the peaceful, loving presence is being this person and all of existence. When there is an
allowing of everything to be as it is, the peaceful, loving presence arises naturally, and I have no idea
who or what allows everything to be as it is, yet there is an allowing that shifts the whole energetic
field. I am confused about the difference between allowing the moment to be, and the practice of
being the peaceful, loving presence.
A: We are dealing here with a profound paradox. As one old Zen master said, “It’s not doing nothing,
it’s doing nothing.” And there is a saying in the Taoist tradition: “In the Great Tao, nothing is done
and nothing is left undone.” So the paradox we are dealing with during this course is a doing that is
an expression of non-doing.
As I often say, “Allowing everything to be as it is, is not an end in and of itself. It is the ground from
which enlightened action springs forth.” Ultimately, enlightened action is entirely spontaneous. So
when it’s spontaneously happening, it’s just spontaneously happening. But what about when it’s not
spontaneously happening? Do we just sit around in our ignorance waiting for it to happen?
It’s similar to the truth that awakening is a grace, in that one cannot manufacture awakening or
make it happen. Yet it just so happens that far more often than not, awakening occurs in someone
who is diligently working towards it. So while there is no direct causal link between what we do and
awakening, there sure is an indirect link. We cannot make it happen, but we can set the stage for it to
be far more likely to happen.
So reality is never contained within dualistic either/or descriptions or statements. And during
this course, I am suggesting something that is quite paradoxical. That is to exercise intention (an
intention to embody a soul value) as effortlessly as possible. Use just enough intention, but not too
much.
This is in effect a sort of practice, like practicing an instrument. You practice because you actually
want to be able to play music spontaneously at some point. You want to just let go and have beautiful
music come out of you. What we’re doing in this course is something like that. We’re practicing
embodying the enlightened condition so that it happens effortlessly and spontaneously more and
more often in daily life.
The difference, however, between practicing an instrument and practicing embodying soul values
is that the enlightened condition is innately present within everyone from the very start. It may be

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unconscious for a while, but it is innate. And perhaps beautiful music is innate within us as well, but
we don’t tend to wake one day being a violin virtuoso with no practice. However, you can just wake
up enlightened one day and stay that way with no practice. It’s very rare but not impossible. And the
reason it’s possible is that enlightenment is the realization of what is always and already the case. Of
course, this doesn’t help us until we realize it for ourself.
So the practice itself is actually an expression of the enlightened condition. The practice is not
simply seeking it; it is also an expression of it. We seek to embody soul values because the soul values
are already arising within us. The very desire to embody a soul value is itself an expression of the
arising of the soul value into consciousness, just like the desire for enlightenment comes from the
enlightened condition itself and is an expression of that condition. It is enlightenment arising in
consciousness as the desire for enlightenment. Now, there’s a paradox!
When you feel like you are spontaneously embodying the awakened condition, great. And when
you find yourself to be challenged, confused, in conflict, or simply interested, do nothing. These
teachings are about the doing of non-doing—the more and more effortless exercise of the intention
to embody whatever our deepest love and wisdom happen to be. Strangely, exercising this intention
can lead to spontaneously embodying more and more of the enlightened condition in your daily life.
As your experience has shown you the more you let go and let be, the more your life simply flows. So
take that experience and investigate what a doing (intention) that feels like no-doing might be like
in your own experience. Can you exercise intention (to embody the loving presence in your actions)
from something other than the “me”? Can the loving presence do it? Can the loving presence have an
intention to more deeply embody the loving presence in all of your daily activities without struggle,
without engaging the “me”? Now, there’s a koan for you.
I suggest you also look at my following response to the next question, where I explore this subject
from an angle that may be helpful.

Setting an Intention without Doing

Q: You often suggest that we should set intentions, as you do in this course. My experience has been
that setting an intention feels like “doing.” The little “me” loves getting to do something, having
exercises or goals or rules or checklists, which leads me away from that sense of peace and universal
connectedness, that “place” no words can really describe.
When I visit hospice clients, I have found that if I consciously set an intention before a visit,
such as to come from a place of love, to listen well, or to have no agenda, I almost always have an
uncomfortable visit. On the other hand, if I simply sit beforehand with no intentions at all, letting
any thoughts just drift by without following them, I am often closer to that place you describe, in the
flow, and the visit brings a special connection.
I wonder if you could please talk about how to set an intention without having it become the little
me “doing.”
A: I suggest you read my response to “The Doing of Non-Doing” before you read this one, because
I covered this subject in some depth. I want to add something here that is pertinent to you. Instead
of “doing” the exercising of intention, think of it more as allowing. In the context of this course it

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would be allowing a soul value to arise within you and express itself. This requires an element of
trust. You set an intention and then let it go. It’s like the doing of non-doing.
The idea here for everyone is to use enough intention to effect a change or deeper embodiment,
without using too much effort. And depending where each person is in their own evolution, the
amount of effort or intention required will be different, even from one day to the next. At the
beginning, it might take a lot of intention. Later, less will be required. And later still, even less.
Discovering effortless effort is a real art. It’s like learning to walk again. It’s discovering a new
dimension of inner balance, a sort of dynamic stillness.

Kind Honesty as a Soul Value

Q: A few years ago, when I heard you emphasize the importance of kindness to oneself and to
everyone and everything around oneself, it really struck me. I realized that in actual moment-to-
moment living, my behavior and words were sometimes far from kind. From that moment on, I
adopted the value of kindness and earnestly focused on applying it to my day-to-day life. It has been
truly transformative.
The term “kindness” was essential to me because I realized that it is different from love. I understood
that kindness is applied love. It became easier for me to monitor, learn, and continually refine and
deepen the value of kindness.
When I started this course, I asked myself if I wanted to adopt a different value. I wanted to focus
more on truth, but it seemed that honesty is truth more tangibly applied. I didn’t want to lose the
focus on kindness, so my new value has become “kind honesty.”
I found myself going back to previous moments in my life where I was not fully honest with others
or myself. I visualized how “kind honesty” would have behaved or what it would have said in those
earlier moments, which was transformative.
While it did not change the past, I felt an enormous weight lifted in visualizing what it would
have looked and felt like if I had moved and spoken from that place. I realized that it was always
a choice, but I wasn’t in touch with it at the time, because of conditioning, self-repression, or fear.
Approaching those past moments with the value of kind honesty kept me focused on my own honest
experience and reference point.
I feel a deep thrill inside knowing that the value of kind honesty can help me embody both truth and
love in a more tangible and practical way.
A: I love how you worked with the soul value of kindness, and how it has now evolved into kind
honesty. I also love how you revisited the past and imagined acting or speaking from kind honesty,
and that you did it with kindness and without guilt or shame about the past. It’s like rehearsing kind
honesty with the past so that you can embody it more clearly in the future. I appreciate how you
make this practice your own by developing your own style that is relevant to you and your life. This
is something that I can encourage but not teach.
Finally, each of these soul values does have its more human and applicable form. Kindness is a very
human form of love, for instance. Honesty is a human form of truth. Gentleness is a human form of

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peace. Openness is a human form of freedom. It’s important to contemplate the various soul values
deeply enough to find the more human and applicable form of each.
In essence, this entire course is about finding human and applicable forms of embodying insight,
even enlightenment. It is about translating transcendent nondual insight into the human world of
duality. In essence, it is to participate in and take responsibility for being redemptive presences in the
world.

Absolute and Relative Truth

Q: One of the big challenges I’m embracing is the realization that truly knowing and living absolute
truth means being more open to the truths of others and being open to a deeper truth, including the
needs within myself. Some of my relative needs, once revealed, may show themselves to be simply
manifestations of a divided self. Once shared, perhaps they dissipate or melt into a shared bigger
truth rooted in trust and love.
Is it possible that revealing relative truths may lead to absolute truth? And in this way, do we
place each other and ourselves back into the whole through vulnerability, honesty, openness, and
acceptance?
A: As is often the case, the answer to your question is contained within the question itself. To be
devoted to truth is to be devoted to all levels of truth, from the absolute truth of one’s being, to the
very human truths of honesty, sincerity, and integrity. In fact, by committing yourself to the relative
truths of honesty, sincerity, and integrity, you open the way to deeper and deeper dimensions of
truth. And these more relative expressions of truth are themselves relative embodiments of the truth
as such.
As you mentioned in your email, to our human dimension, truthfulness can feel somewhat
vulnerable. But that very willingness to be vulnerable is itself a great strength and an embodiment of
the soul value of courage. So too does truth require an open mind and an open heart, which means
to love—to have a love and devotion to truth wherever you find it.
Truth also requires great openness and flexibility, and the ability to have one’s mind changed when
bigger and truer truths arise. This is humility. True humility keeps us from becoming fixated and
defensive. We must love and be devoted to truth as such, from whomever and wherever it arises,
not simply be fixated on our fundamentalist version of truth. All of this is necessary to embody the
fundamental truth of the ground of being in daily living.
More often than not, the relative embodiment and expression of truth is something more like
honesty and sincerity. There are, of course, truths in the form of facts, the actual and factual details of
some event that happened or is happening, for instance. But so often in human interactions, honesty,
sincerity, and integrity are the most applicable and relevant forms of truth to embody. And these
human forms of truthfulness are so very needed in the world today.

Embodying Your Aloneness

Q: In Session 2, you spoke about the two sides of oneness—the fullness of being and the quality
of aloneness. You mentioned that taking the one seat is to fully embody your aloneness. Does
embodying aloneness mean taking full responsibility for oneself?

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You also said that one must go through one’s aloneness to run into the connectedness of all existence.
Can you elaborate further on how one can “go through aloneness?” Does it mean that one needs to
embrace and understand aloneness fully? (I believe I understand the difference between aloneness and
loneliness.)
When you mentioned that reality is always bringing polarities together, what exactly does “bringing
together” mean? Does this mean that when one experiences one end of the spectrum (say, feeling
loving) one will also experience the other extreme of the spectrum (feeling hatred)?
A: To embody one’s aloneness is to stand in one’s own light, in one’s own being, in that place that
thought can’t define. It is to subjectively go beyond being and nonbeing. At first, it feels completely
alone, not lonely, but utterly alone. But by being willing to be completely alone, alone and apart
even from the movement of thought, the polarity of togetherness and aloneness collapses. It collapses
because you realize what is beyond all pairs of opposites, what their source is. The opposites, all of
them, are contained in you, not you in them. They are manifestations of your source-being.
To enter this aloneness is synonymous with entering into the unknown, into the void of being,
where subjectively, inwardly, everything is left behind, and all knowledge is relinquished. It is to
enter into your own nothingness, without even the thought or mere image of nothingness to keep
you company. It is complete surrender, and the highest act of love. It is to leap beyond life and death
without moving an inch.
Then everything, everywhere, and everywhen is contained within you—heavens and hells and
everything in between. The entire play of opposites is yours, and you are their ground. Subjectively,
which means experientially, you are then the void-source from which the opposites arise. You are
their ground, and they rest within you. Ten thousand incarnations are but the blink of an eye.
So please pardon the depth of my response. I understand that it may seem to be quite intangible, but it’s
the only complete response I can give you. And I trust that since you evoked it, it has meaning for you.

Who Are You without the Inner Judge?

Q: Can you say something about how to avoid falling prey to the inner judge? Due to health
problems and traumas, my default state seems to be hopelessness. Therapy has not been helping
either. I have identified “hope” as one of the most profound values worth living for (underlying
encouragement, truth, etc.). But I find it really difficult to bring these values to myself and others.
I seem to be convinced that opening up and experiencing the peace and freedom underneath is not
what I truly want. I mentally know it’s only the inner judge speaking, but somehow I continue to
believe it very deeply.
I want this horrible spell to be broken. Can you please help?
A: It takes courage to slay the inner judge, to stand in that aloneness with no support but the silence
of your heart. We internalize the judge of so many others in our lives, others that do not belong in
us. But you are not their victim. It is your mind, after all. And you must stand on your own, in the
light of your own dignity.
Hope is for the future. It is for something that is not here today. But hopelessness is also a thief of

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your life. Choose a soul value that is here, now, inside you. Stand in your own light: the love, or
truth, or peace, or freedom that is present in you.
Have you ever asked yourself why you listen to the unrelenting judge in your mind? People are afraid
of standing in their aloneness, in their fierce and loving heart. They think that they would be lost
without the inner judge, without the thousand critical voices of the past. They are unconsciously
afraid of leaving all of those old critical voices. So we cling to what we know, even as we hate it. It’s as
if we are waiting for someone’s permission to be worthy of living our own lives.
It’s like never leaving home completely. We tend to leave home in body but not in spirit, and
certainly not in mind. We carry the old voices within us, especially the critical ones, as if it was our
duty. Well, it’s not your duty. Your duty is to step into you—not the you of the past that is defined by
all the old voices and all the old ideas, but the you that is timeless, a silent presence within. The you
that has no history. The you that stands prior to the you that you know. And slay the vicious inner
judge, the tyrant within. Claim your life! Don’t hope that it happens—do it! Keep your ability to
wisely discriminate, to be honest and true. But slay the tyrant.
Being sick or having experienced traumas does not mean that you can’t reclaim your life. When you
have health challenges, you just have health challenges. It’s not your fault. Imagine that. It doesn’t
mean anything. You just do the best that you can do.
Dare to stare down the inner judge. Don’t let it move you, don’t let it intimidate you. It’s a bully that
you just need to stand up to. The inner judge is a bluff. It’s all fear. It’s all fit and fury amounting to
nothing. It’s a thought. It’s just a thought. There’s nothing to fear, nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just
a thought.
Who are you without the tyrannical judge defining and demeaning you?
Really, who are you then?
Embrace that silence. Be what is not a thought, what no thought can touch.
If you didn’t want an awake life, you wouldn’t have signed up for this course. I have great faith in
you. I trust in your heart. Now you trust in it too. Then there will be two of us.

Practice from Your Heart

Q: I have been working with the question you asked in the written exercise for Week 2: What is the
primary challenge I would have to embrace to act out my chosen life meaning?
My chosen soul value is “Best possible to as many as possible.” The foundation is that I am in a
movement to become more and more conscious in every moment—conscious enough to contact my
soul value and conscious enough to notice when I am about to react in a conditioned and reactive
way instead.
This is where the challenges that relate to daily meditation practice come into play. Daily meditation
is essential to develop my ability to be present and to be able to see behind the conditioned mind.
Through the years, I have succeeded in reprioritizing and sacrificing other activities, thereby
creating practical possibilities for daily practice. I have also developed the courage to not let my
own ideas about what other people might think about my practice affect me too much. Although

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these impediments have been mitigated, I am facing another challenge inside myself. My ego has
gained new strength to prevent or postpone daily practice, primarily through rational or practical
displacement activities.
The paradox is that gained insight and spiritual experiences (death threats to the ego) have only
strengthened the ego in this regard. My experience is that this cannot be resolved by strict discipline.
Discipline has worked for me in many areas of life, but when it comes to spiritual development, it
somehow just seems to add to the strength and cunning workings of the ego.
My primary challenge is to find ways to not let the ego prevent my daily practice.
A: As you are realizing, discipline will only take you so far in spiritual practice because it depends on
the personal will, and all forms of will are ultimately limited. What is needed is to transition from a
will-based motivation to a motivation arising from love. Practice because it is an expression of what
you love and cherish, because it is an expression of your true nature, your connectedness to all and
everyone.
When you are meditating, don’t just see it as a discipline; see it as a living and direct expression of
the enlightened mind and heart. It is how you tell the world that you care, that you love it enough to
practice the selfless and silent act of meditation so that you can be awake and wise and loving when
you engage with life. Practice from your heart. Practice because it is a direct way of expressing the
spiritual heart, for the sake of all beings. Practice because without it, spirituality degrades into mere
words and dies. Sit from your heart. Sit in your heart, with the whole universe.
And I will be there too.

Help, but Do Not Carry

Q: I have been following your teachings for more than ten years. Enlightenment still seems out of
my reach (apart from mini-glimpses). But soul values and serving resonate deeply, such as in your
recent quote, “The most beautiful thing in life is not being liberated—it’s helping everybody else
along the way.”
Your course has strengthened my calling to serve and care with integrity. I am a medical doctor, so
this is what I do for a living, and is what I see at present as the meaning of my life: listening with
presence and compassion to help others.
I am ending this week with a very sore back. I feel as if I am carrying my patients and trying to
be a pole they can hang on to. Where am I going wrong? Is it that I am doing rather than being,
taking responsibility for what is not my duty, and confusing compassion with being a sponge for the
suffering of others? Am I trying to “fix” them?
How can I continue listening and being there for others, while respecting the limits of my body and
ego, my own story, and my traumatic past that can still be triggered? When I am with people, I feel
okay, carried and inspired by something much bigger that I am. But by the end of the day, I feel
battered.
A: All those in the caring professions must learn that they are not responsible for anyone’s physical,
psychological, or spiritual health. We are here to help people help themselves, or for medical doctors,
to help the body heal itself. You cannot carry others’ sufferings on your shoulders. It is not good for

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you or for them. Perhaps you’re overinvested in your patients. Help, but do not carry. Help, but do
not carry. Help, but do not carry. Make that your mantra.
Loves knows when to pick up, and love knows when to put down. Remember that letting go is love
too. Imagine if I picked up and carried everyone’s suffering that they bring to me. I would be a wreck
within a week. I never carry anyone’s suffering for them. I have too much faith in them to do that.
By letting go as easily as I extend a helping hand, I remain in a state of innocence—open, clean, and
clear for whatever comes next. You must let go as easily as you welcome in, and see both as loving
gestures. Do not carry anyone on your shoulders. Remember that you are not in control of life; you
are a vessel that life flows through. Now let it flow through completely.
The secret is to be completely committed to each situation and each person, without being personally
invested. Remember, it’s not about you. Everyone’s life is their own.
Bless you for all of your service to others. Now serve others by taking care of yourself. Everyone will
benefit.

Don’t Let the Superego Hijack Soul Values

Q: I am currently unraveling years of conditioned egoic sacrifice related to self-worth and duty. You
describe a soul value as something so important that a person would be willing to sacrifice for it.
But it seems to me that this is a project that ego could really take on, leading to all sorts of distorted
activity and exhausting involvement in various causes.
Perhaps the key is discerning what is self-transcendent? Is living from soul values actually a form of
sacrificing life? From that perspective, is there really sacrifice when one is aligned with soul values, or
are we sacrificing ego when we come from soul values? It also seems that living from a soul value isn’t
exhaustive but generative, but it’s a bit of a slippery slope for me.
A: When working with soul values, you need to be vigilant and on the lookout for the superego
trying to hijack the whole process. The superego is essentially the internalized critical parent
masquerading as wisdom and truth. The superego is disconnected from the heart, a sort of tyrannical,
judgmental critic. When it arises, it needs to be seen and acknowledged as a false persona, a mask,
and an illusion. If the practice of embodying soul values is hijacked and corrupted by the superego, it
will only reinforce and solidify the ego.
Sacrifice that comes from the heart is an act and expression of love, in the same way that good
parents will at times have to sacrifice momentary pleasures (like sleep when their child is young) out
of love for their child. The sacrifices that soul values call for are essentially sacrificing the egocentric
perspective, both one’s own as well as others.’ To our true being, such sacrifices are acts of love and
truth and expressions of true nature. They are part of taking the one seat. They are not based on the
judgmental superego. In fact, giving up the superego itself is one of the sacrifices necessary to make in
order to embody our true nature. Such a sacrifice is actually a joy and a blessing.
It is necessary that we learn to discriminate between the superego and the wisdom of the heart.
The superego will take the form of whatever you love most and fool you into believing that it is the
truth. One of the main tip-offs that the superego is operating is the presence of judgmentalism,
unworthiness, and being overly critical. The superego is an aspect of the false self; it’s not who you

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are. It’s not true. It’s not wise. It’s not loving. It’s an illusion masquerading as truth, as you. It’s a
dream and nothing more.
Granted, sacrifices that are genuine expressions of true nature, and sacrifices demanded by the
judgmental and parental superego, are not at first obvious. But with some practice, the superego will
become glaringly obvious, and one’s heartfelt true nature will shine forth and express itself in daily
life through essential soul values or values of the heart.

Curiosity—One of Our Most Fundamental Soul Values

Q: Would you consider curiosity a soul value? When I sit with what has been present and almost
unconscious within me all my life, it is curiosity. Although truth and courage have been very present
in my life, especially after actively becoming a seeker ten years ago, it was curiosity that took me there
and continues to drive much of my experience.
A: Yes, curiosity is indeed a soul value. Curiosity includes other soul values like openness, truth
(what is truth?), courage, etc. It is my experience that curiosity is one of our most fundamental soul
values. To be curious, to wonder, to explore new vistas, is as spiritual as it gets, and a completely and
naturally occurring human virtue.

A Sincere and Honest Question

Q: Before even writing a question, I wanted to know if there is someone else besides Adya who
might be able to answer a question. My question is not up to speed for the class. I do know this.
When I registered the course, I was not sure it was appropriate for me. I have read The Way of
Liberation, and I enjoyed listening to Sessions 1 and 2 in this course. On some level, I am learning,
but my question is really coming from someone who has not had any kind of shift and really is
egocentric, as much as I wish it could be different. I feel that the class is perfectly suited to those who
have had even a tiny taste of anything different from the normal, egocentric life.
I don’t want to take up Adya’s time with my questions, but if there is anyone else I can write to,
please let me know and I’ll send my questions.
I hope to someday embody the things that now just feel like words to me. I have the class notes and
someday they will be more relevant to me!
A: Thank you for your question about questions. Please feel free to email in a question, even if you
feel that it is too elementary for this course, because there is no question that is too elementary. All
your question needs to be is sincere and honest. Still, as with all the other questions, I may or may
not respond, due to the mountain of questions that I get. But please do feel free to email a question.
I’m afraid I’m the only one here to answer questions for this course.
Don’t feel like you need to have had some spiritual opening in order to embody the soul values.
Think of the soul values as being representative of that which you hold as most dear and important
to your life. Work with the one that you resonate with the most, and it will open up vistas of
possibilities you had not imagined.
This course is for you as much as for anyone. There was a reason that you were called to participate in

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it. And that reason will make itself known more and more. As for me, I simply want to welcome you.
I hope that you enjoy yourself.

Why Does Life Move as It Does?

Q: Why do we face more and more persecution and intensity the deeper we move into
enlightenment and awakened consciousness and being?
It seems the more I move into the awareness beyond thought and mind, the more I am persecuted
by people and society in general. I recently suffered police brutality. The damage triggered my disease
and is causing great suffering. I have accepted that enlightenment does not mean easy street. I look at
Jesus or Gandhi and see how they were given greater and greater challenges. Why does life move in
this way?
It is interesting to hold to truth as I watch the police bend the truth to cover up their violent actions.
I feel more and more alone. The path is getting thinner and thinner: the razor’s edge. I am challenged
with intense disease, poverty, and homelessness. The pain of these things is often crushing.
For the most part, this being abides in the silence beyond thought and mind, but when I am hooked
by mind, intense anger and frustration arise. I can see how this relates to my old pattern of an
agenda. But all I really want for myself currently is to be able to meet my needs of food, shelter, and
being able to take care of this terrible disease. It is hard not to get frustrated and angry when society
and the cost of living get in the way of simply taking care of myself.
I see how I remain undivided even in the face of such intense challenges, but what is it in me that is
being challenged? And where is this resistance coming from?
A: We have talked in the past. I know your life situation, and I love you. I love your honesty; I love
your gritty determination; I love that you suffer and fall and get back up. And I love that you know
the truth beyond words, and that your heart has been made pure by the challenges that you live
with day-to-day, even if it doesn’t seem that way at times. I love that you take responsibility for your
resistance, and question where it comes from.
Why? Why is your life, or anyone’s life, the way that it is? As if there was a why, as if the sun shone
for a reason, or there was a moral reason that it will expand, swallow the earth, and explode some
billions of years from now. Why am I sitting here and you sitting there? I don’t know. I no longer ask.
It’s just so much more benign and loving that way. I love not knowing everything. I love not asking
life to justify itself to me.
But I hear you, from way over here. And I know you as I know myself. And you know me as you
know yourself. And there is no difference, even as there is.
There is no why. That’s the good news. No one is to blame, not even you. You are the way you are
because the cosmos is the way that it is. And the cosmos is the way that it is because you are the way
that you are.
Hold to the silent thread, the one that weaves itself through each and every moment, the one that
almost no one understands, the one that no event can destroy. You hold to your end, and I’ll hold to
my end. And when I feel a tug on that thread, I’ll know who it is.

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A Loving and Courageous Heart
Q: I discovered these days that I have more than one soul value, including peace, freedom,
autonomy, and service. But I don´t seem to be acting from them in my daily life. Instead, my actions
come from fear, anger, and other emotions. You said, “What you do is an expression of what you
value.” So I wonder how to translate this to my life in real actions.
Service is the only activity and value that feels meaningful and is clear to me. When I am working as
a volunteer with children, I feel that I am in the right place at the right time and that I am actually
taking the one seat. It just feels “right,” and I feel the connection with life. I light up. No words can
explain how it feels when I look into their eyes and we connect.
I have not had an awakening experience, but this seems the closest I have been to feeling what you
talked about. How do I translate that to the rest of my life, which is a mess? Can I? Can I apply it in
only one aspect of my life? Or does it have to be completely integrated into my daily life, in all that I
do, in order to be a true soul value and to take the one seat?
A: You mentioned beautifully connecting with children, but not so much in the adult world. You
also mentioned experiencing fear, anger, and other difficult emotions when acting in your daily life.
Truth is the one soul value that cuts most quickly to the heart of the world of relating. What is true,
or simply being totally honest?
So here’s a practice: Take one day, and stop lying for one day—just one day. Stop lying to others and
stop lying to yourself. It sounds simple enough. But it will open your eyes like never before—no
lying to others for one day; no lying to yourself for one day. Of course your fear will come up, but
when it does, don’t lie to yourself and say, “I can’t do this because I’m afraid.”
Generally, we are angry, resentful, and afraid when we stop telling others and ourselves the truth. The
more we conceal and hide from our own truth, the more upset we get. We are, in fact, encouraged
to lie. We are taught to conform. To some extent, it’s necessary to conform ourselves to society to
become civilized. But most of us have conformed too much. We have conformed to such an extent
that we are unhappy, angry, and resentful. And then we insist that others conform to our preferences,
either overtly or covertly. This is the game we have been taught to play, and it is killing us with anger,
and with fear, and with alienation.
No one is to blame. This terrible game has been blindly passed on from one unconscious generation
to another. But it is now up to you, to us, to change the game. We become responsible as soon as we
understand the nature of the game. So we endeavor to stop lying to ourselves and to each other. We
endeavor to tell the truth, in our stumbling and imperfect way. And we allow others to do the same.
That is love. That is compassion. That is virtue. That is caring, truly caring, for us all. And it takes
courage, a loving and courageous heart.
Your heart is loving. You love those children. And almost every adult is a hurt child who was taught
to lie, too. So your love overcomes your fear. You tell the truth to yourself and to others because
you love yourself, and you love others. There is nothing more intimate, more life affirming, more
compassionate than truth, honesty, and integrity.
So be deeply, intimately, lovingly honest for one day. And if you get afraid, or angry, or resentful,
be honest about that. Remind yourself that those are mostly learned reactions, ways to say no to an

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open and vulnerable heart. But your heart is strong; it is robust; it is still here after all the hurts and
disappointments of life. The truth is that your heart is still here, and you still love and you still care.
Just be completely honest for one day, and let others be honest, too. And if you like it, do it for
another day, or a week, or who knows—maybe you’ll decide to live in the honestly loving heart for
the rest of your life. But begin with one day: today. Can you honestly say that you don’t want to do
that?

Awakening at the Gut Level

Q: My two most prominent soul values are loving-kindness and nonjudgment. As a result of these
strong values, bridging the ground of being to the awakening in my heart comes naturally. What has
been difficult is bridging the waking-up experience to the gut. How do we bridge to the gut in order
to truly take our one seat?
A: There are three main centers that awakened consciousness can flow through: head-awakened
mind, the clear space of awareness; heart-awakened boundless love and intimacy with all existence;
and gut-awakened ground of being, the selfless void of infinite potential. Of these, the gut level is the
most fundamental and rarely attained in full. It is also the most directly related to “taking the one
seat.”
The separate self-sense constructs itself on these three levels of being as well. The head is our
conceptual sense of self. If we awaken on the level of mind, it means that we have awoken from
conceptual identifications, and our sense of self, or being, becomes the clear and empty space of
awareness.
The heart is where our emotional sense of self is constructed and maintained. It is defined by
emotional identifications, attachments, aversions, and blocks to the flow of selfless love, agape.
In the gut, the separate self is constructed at its most basic and fundamental level. At the gut level,
self is neither conceptual nor emotional. It is a simple, existential, and physical contraction. This
contraction is so habitual and generalized (though it can also be experienced as localized and acute
at times, as in the experience of deep fear), that it goes unnoticed by most people. At this level,
self is nothing but a habitual contraction. It is the embodied fear of both life and death, being and
nonbeing. Essentially, it is the fear of our true nature, the void of infinity.
Awakening at the gut level often feels like a very real death. Even though it is not a physical death, it
can feel even more real than physical death. It is the death of the self at its most fundamental level.
Here, the self has not been temporarily transcended; it has been uprooted. The experience then is one
of a death more real than real, followed by a rebirth—but not a rebirth of self; rather, it is the birth
of what I call the gaze of infinity. Infinity is what’s left when the self has been uprooted, when the
primal contraction has died into life.
So, back to the subject of this course and of your question. The soul values that are representative of
the gut are intimate detachment, courage, spontaneity, selflessness, and a profound groundedness. It
is as if the entire cosmos has taken up residence within your body. You are somehow intimately one
with and profoundly detached at the same time. So exercising the most profound and intimate agape
love with no attachment at all is the activity of gut level selflessness. It is a doing without any doing.

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Imagine at your core a pregnant void of infinite potentiality, beyond all identity of any kind and yet
fully present—grounded like a mountain, immovable yet moving, detached yet lovingly responding,
unselfconscious yet present like never before. In other words, finally a simple human being.
Breathe, act, respond, meditate, from the silence of gut level being. Reside in the empty mountain
until it begins to dance.

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WEEK THREE
Notes from Adyashanti
Enlightened Relativity - The enlightened view of relativity, or manifest existence, sees, knows, and
experiences all of life as an expression of the ultimate principle; call it God, the Self, consciousness,
the Tao, emptiness, the quantum field, Buddha nature, or simply the infinite. The infinite both
transcends and includes the relative world of duality.
In a more personal sense, when you awaken, what wakes up is the infinite, both beyond
(transcendent of ) and within human form. If the awakening is deep and profound, you know and
experience that the transcendent and formless infinite is also all manifest forms. Spirit and form
are not simply unified; they are the ultimate principle appearing in two different ways. Everything
everywhere is the living face of God—both infinite and limited, perfect and fallible, timeless and
time bound, invulnerable and fragile.
Experiencing the infinite in and as everything everywhere is what I call enlightened relativity and
is the key to unlocking a whole world of possibilities. It is, however, very paradoxical to the mind,
profoundly subtle and difficult to truly understand, and challenging to embody in one’s humanity
and daily life. But embracing the paradox of enlightenment is also the deepest joy and love that one
will ever know.
Embracing the paradox of enlightenment - Always being, always becoming is the paradox at the
heart of the enlightened condition. Always being refers to the absolute dimension of being. True
spiritual awakening reveals the “always and already” condition of reality. It reveals that we always and
already are Buddhas.
In a more theistic form of description, true spiritual awakening reveals that we always and already
are the sons and daughters of God. And all of existence shares the same ultimate nature. Everything
everywhere in all dimensions of existence is the manifest face of the One. All is Buddha, there is only
the Godhead. And you are that, always and already. That’s the gospel, meaning the good news, of the
absolute domain.
Here’s where it gets difficult to comprehend. The transcendent reality, the One, the cosmic Self, the
infinite—which is always, already, and forever what it is beyond all change—is also in an eternal state of
becoming, which is to say that change and evolution are always happening within that which is ultimate
and changeless. And where does that change and evolution take place? It takes place in the manifest world.
The manifest world is in a constant state of flux, flow, and evolution. And that means that reality has two
faces, or aspects: the changeless face of eternity, and the always evolving face of relativity.
The ground of your being is always and already timeless and eternal. It is unconditioned, unformed,
perfect, and changeless. This can be directly experienced in the awakened state of being. That is one
aspect of the enlightened condition, but in and of itself it is not a complete realization.
The other half of the story is that all of manifestation is an ever-changing and evolving expression of
the timeless, changeless ground of being, the absolute. The entire cosmos and beyond is a relative,
changing, and evolving expression of the absolute. Looking at reality from the perspective of the

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absolute, it is unchanging and eternal. Looking at reality from the perspective of the relative view, the
view of manifestation, it is change, flux, and evolution.
These are the two aspects of reality. But actually these two are really one, because reality is simply
reality no matter how you see it. It would be more accurate to say that from the enlightened
condition, there is nothing but changeless change, and you are that.
You are perfect imperfection, changeless change, timeless time, and formless form. As eternity
you are always and already whole, complete, and perfect. And you are also an imperfect, fallible,
human embodiment of eternity that is capable of evolving into a more and more clear manifestation
of eternity, without end. These are the absolute and relative dimensions of being, as seen and
experienced from the enlightened condition.
The focus of this course is primarily on the ever-evolving capacity to embody the enlightened
condition both in yourself and in your daily life. It is the practice of Buddhas embodying and
expressing their Buddhahood, not to achieve some imaginary goal, but because it is an instinct within
the heart of being.
Practicing embodiment as a voyage of discovery - When viewed correctly, spiritual embodiment
practice is essentially an expression of enlightenment, not a means of seeking enlightenment, whether
you have experienced enlightenment or not. The practice is to embody, meaning to express, the deepest
and most meaningful values that you know, for the benefit of both yourself and all beings everywhere.
The challenge is to translate insight into action, response, and relationship—at first intentionally, and
later spontaneously. This practice is grounded in a sense of love and caring. It is an expression of the
caring heart, and is most fruitfully undertaken in the spirit of love, and for the benefit of all beings.
This last statement is of great importance to understand. The practice of embodying soul values is
not an improvement project, not a form of seeking, and not a way to either aggrandize yourself or be
judgmental toward yourself or others. These are all egocentric orientations that have no place in the
embodiment process. You need to be very careful not to get caught in any of these dead-end cul-de-sacs.
Embodying soul values is an act of love and caring. It is an expression of what you love and must be
carried out from the heart. Always remember that soul values are expressions of what you love, value,
and cherish. They are heartfelt expressions of the truth of your being. They are ways of taking full
responsibility for making your life, to whatever extent you are capable of, an expression of what you
love and value most for the sake of all beings. This practice is a practice of aligning yourself with more
and more awakened, loving, and wise values.
Our values determine our mode of being in the world, always - Our mode of being is determined
by what we value and by our beliefs.
We can always reexamine our values if our mode of being in the world isn’t working for us, or is
causing suffering for ourself and/or others - If you are suffering or causing suffering, look closely
and honestly at what values and beliefs you are operating from. What beliefs are you really and truly
valuing? Are they good for you, and are they good for others? Remember, you can always change the
values that you are operating from. Becoming conscious of the values that you are operating from,
and deciding if they represent what you truly love and cherish, is a significant and often humbling
part of this practice.

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Sacrifice - To sacrifice egocentricity in body (actions), mind (speech), and spirit (intentions). It also
means to choose truth and love at every turn, and to sacrifice deception and deceit.
Spiritual inflation - Any version of seeing yourself to be above or beyond others.

Session 3 Notes
Discovery without Endpoint
• These teachings are a journey of discovery that is hard to convey.
• We’re conditioned around seeking, wanting, and improving. We’re chasing a carrot that is just
out of reach.
• This course is not oriented around self-improvement, although that can be a by-product. The
intention is to investigate and embody the deepest values in our lives and our speech.
• We are on a voyage of discovery with no endpoint. Rather, it is an endless exploration of
how to be in the world for the benefit of ourselves and all beings.

Embodying Unity through the Heart

• Our deepest values are inherent to the ground of our being. They are also inherent to our deep
spiritual insight of unity, the fundamental sameness of all things.
• We all know about feeling relatively good, when we have an intuitive and intimate connection
with life around us. The psychological lack of inner conflict enables life to seem brighter.
• In this intuitive feeling of a less divided state, there is a vividness of perception that gives us the
foretaste of unity.
• Unity informs our actions. It changes the way we move in time and space.
• Along with a deep understanding of unity comes the challenge of embodying our own
goodness.
• Embodiment can also be called “enheartenment,” when we drop down from the head to the
feeling center of the heart.
• Embodiment is a heartfelt endeavor, not an imposition of ideas, which only leads to
frustration. We have to feel the connection.
• Values arise out of connectivity. When we feel connected, we value things like peace, love, and
truth.

Our Values Create Our Mode of Being

• What we value in life informs and creates our mode of being, the operating system through
which we engage in the world.
• There are two kinds of values:
• The values we think we have.
• The values we actually have, which are demonstrated by our actions.

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 • The mind can go into self-judgment when it sees the discrepancy between what it thinks it
values and what it sees as its actions. This egoic orientation can stop your evolution.
• Be willing to see and then take a stand for your values. Don’t give in to the judgmental voice,
which is an ingrained and self-destructive habit. Don’t be intimidated by the mind’s bullying
and its thoughts of unworthiness. Don’t contract and hide in victimhood.
• When your actions don’t align with your values, bring consciousness to the discrepancy so that
you have something to work with.

Becoming More Congruent

• This is a voyage of discovery to explore your conditioning and welcome your humanity. Are
your actions congruent with your values?
• You can stop being run by systems and beliefs that no longer feel relevant to you.
• When you see your programming, you can move out of your head and into your heart. Slow
the process down, breathe, let the center of gravity come into your heart, and feel the quality of
your own being and the quality of the moment you are in. Transition from thinking to sensing.
• This process is more than mindfulness. To be really aware, you have to drop down from the
head to the rest of your being.

Enlightened Relativity
• Enlightenment teachings often talk about waking up from the trance state of relativity.
• The whole view of truth is beyond time and space and is the reality of time and space.
• When our inner eye is opened, we see that the material world is extraordinary, profound, sacred,
and divine. The timeless is here; it is this—it is to see the face of God in everything, even in one’s
own form.
• The experience of unity is a profound experience of intimacy. This is a heartfelt experience
of being where we are simultaneously unattached and yet also completely intimate. It’s an
extraordinary paradox.
• When we wake up to the perceptual and intuitive capacity of the heart, we see the truth of
relativity.
• Any form requires opposites. When life stops being the play of opposites, that’s the end of life,
because that’s what life is.

Being Conscious of Unconscious Programming

• When your conditioned operating programs cease, the actions that reflect your soul values are
spontaneous.
• When you are in your intuitive experience of being, you value different things than when you’re
in a conflicted mind state.
• Your mode of being changes when you are in a profound state of spiritual openness.
However, you are not in that state all the time. Your unconscious programming will pull

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 you out. It is then important to get to the root cause that pulls you out so that your mode
of being is able to reflect your deepest values in whatever state you are in.
• When your mode of being reflects the more enlightened mode of being, you care more. When
you want the world to leave you alone, you are in a more egoic state of consciousness.
• The intention of this course is to bring your unconscious material to consciousness so that you
have more choice.

The Changeless Is the Changing

• Your absolute ground of being is changeless and timeless. When you see the world through the eyes
of enlightenment, you see the absolute as the world. This changes your relationship to the world.
• Enlightenment embraces the absolute unchanging and the ever changing, ever evolving.
• The human experience is the changeless and the relative experience that changes, evolves,
and is fallible. We are the manifestation of this paradox.
• We can learn to more accurately manifest the transcendent in our lives without needing to do it
perfectly.
• Enlightened relativity is a way of seeing life as an endless voyage of discovery.

The Current Importance of Embodiment

• This teaching is profoundly important at this time in the US and the world, as enlightened
values are not often in play on any side.
• There is currently an absolute breakdown of truth and compassion when the moral life is not
meaningful.
• Becoming depressed about the current state of affairs is not helpful. It is crucial to take
responsibility for your own life and your mode of being.
• How can we be in the world for the benefit of ourselves and all beings?

Egocentricity Can Co-opt the Teachings

• We can’t embody our deepest experience of being until we are willing to sacrifice our egocentric
orientation to life.
• Nondual teachings are extremely potent. In the past, it took many years to have access to the
deepest nondual teachings because they can evoke deep awakenings. However, an egocentricity
can co-opt the teachings.
• It is often most difficult to teach someone right after an awakening experience, because there
is often an inflated state of being. A part of this experience is natural, because deep, profound
shifts can be exalted. Egocentricity grabs at these states.
• The shifts are great, but you must give profound attention to how you live them. Embody them
(albeit imperfectly) to the greatest extent possible.

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Mature Realization
• You grow into what you hold as most valuable, even as the ground of your being is
simultaneously complete.
• You know when someone has come into wisdom when he or she is not stuck in the
absolute but can see the face of God in both the timeless and the relative.

The Grace of Spontaneity and the Value of Intention

• There are two faces of the realized condition: total spontaneity and practiced intention.
This paradox only exists in the mind, not in experience.
• Profound spontaneity comes from the awakened heart. Can I manifest realization even when
I’m not in the state of grace?
• It is important to manifest your deepest state of being from the heart because of the tremendous
sorrow and suffering in the world, even though there is great pressure to compromise.
• How can you clearly manifest from the depth of your experience? Keep this question alive so
that it grows in the process of discovery. It is great when the manifestation is spontaneous.
When it’s not, practice your intention.
• Great writers aren’t always inspired, but they’re willing to write everyday whether they’re
inspired or not.
• Sometimes you can manifest with grace, flow, and ease; sometimes it takes work. You can’t
always just sit around and wait for grace.

Discovering How to Apply Wisdom

• The spirit of discovery comes from an innate curiosity and a deep instinct for love, truth,
wisdom, and connection.
• When you feel connected, how do you stay in places and with people who are
disconnected? Do you withdraw or do you express what is real inside for you? Sometimes
it’s important to express and sometimes it’s not.
• Sometimes it’s hard to know what a situation calls for and if the situation in question is
amenable to change. The process is not theoretical but calls for presence and discrimination.

Caller #1: Becoming a Good Steward of Your Life

• “Responsibility” becomes a loaded word when it signifies a “should.”
• Responsibility applies to something deep within that gives your life great meaning.
• There is a responsibility to do the things that are necessary to life, and also a responsibility
to those things that do not kill the soul. Find those things where the two forms of
responsibility are not in conflict, and make changes if necessary.
• Try to avoid massive compromises in either direction, but rather, bring both forms of
responsibility into harmony. This process will benefit you and the people around you.

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 • Consider how you will feel about what you are doing 10 years from now or at the end of your
life. Look through the lens of what you value deeply.
• There are no guarantees and there is never absolute certainty regarding the life directions that you
choose. Uncertainty is part of life and is not an indication that you’re not aligned. That’s the fun of it!

Caller #2: Shifting How You Move in Life

• The personal will begins to dissipate when you become more conscious. You move from an
orientation of “what I want” to one where life simply flows out of you.
• Deep spontaneity happens for no particular reason. You will transition from an orientation of
how life is supposed to look and happen, to a deep experience where it doesn’t make so much
sense. It becomes an intuitive sense of being and a feeling of insecurity that is outside the box.
• Orient towards what is innate to you as opposed to your social conditioning.
• To clear negative energy:
1. Do some sort of energetic cleansing every day through such things as qigong or tai chi.
2. Find something that grounds you, like meditating on the hara. From some, meditating
on vast emptiness causes them to become too porous. Focusing on breathing in the hara
anchors energy and one can feel more stability.
3. If you have a negative relationship with negative energy, it sticks rather than moves
through you. Observe any contractions that move from the negative energy and ask if it’s
necessary for you to resist it. Resistance causes the energy to stick.

Caller #3: Working with Trauma

• When traumatic experiences happen in childhood, your habitual patterns get set. The “no” in
life is a young, frightened experience that hasn’t found resolution yet.
• It can be helpful to find a skilled therapist who works with trauma.
• See if you can completely relinquish the conscious desire to get rid of the “no.” Approach it
from a healing and loving perspective. What if you are the very person that this part of yourself
needs to be compassionate?
• It is important to continue moving in positive, productive ways in your life, even in the light of
resistance.

Caller #4: When the Creation of Self Stops

• There is a profound inner stillness and quiet within you that seems in contrast to the speed of
the outer world.
• When you go into the deep state of stillness, your experience of self changes.
• The good news is that what you really are can’t disappear. It appears when the whole creation of
yourself stops.
• On the other side is quiet, silent presence. Its origin is the ground of being.
• It is important that all the work in this course is grounded in a quiet place.

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Supplemental Teaching 3
Week 3 Exercise:
Values in Daily Action
Written Practice
In the written exercises, try to be as succinct as you can. When we are brief, we are actually the most
clear and powerful—it pulls the most clarity from you.
• What would it mean to take more responsibility for manifesting your most meaningful
value in your life? Consider what it would mean in your spiritual practice, in your way of
relating to others, in your work life, or accomplishing some project.

Daily Practice
• Each day do one action that expresses your commitment to the most meaningful value in
your life. And make it a different action every day.
• The idea is to experience that life takes on meaning and focus as soon as you commit to
manifesting your most meaningful value every day in your thoughts, words, and deeds. Making
this commitment is what it means to take responsibility for being a redemptive presence in the
world.
• Translate your deepest experience of being into action so that you’re not just having revelations,
but seeking to actually live and apply them in the world of time and space.
• Our lives feel meaningful to the extent that we are connected with a transcendent value, with
something that transcends simple self-interest and connects us to life as a whole.
• If you don’t start to translate realization into human action, you can be left in a state where you
have no definitive orienting principle in your life. It can disconnect you from the relative world,
which is an unfortunate spiritual potential by-product and a kind of spiritual illness.
• No matter what you think you’re doing, you are translating your deep spiritual experiences into
being. You’re doing it even if you think you’re not doing it.
• Imagine if each day you just did one action—no matter how small it is—that manifested
in some way what is most valuable and meaningful to you about life. If you did just one
thing each day, I can almost guarantee you, it would revolutionize over time your whole
experience of life, not only for you, but there would be a benefit for all beings around you,
too.
• We’re not just doing this simply for self-centered reasons so that we can experience meaning,
direction, freedom, love, or peace. We’re doing this because in the heart of our deepest
realizations, they connect us. The realizations connect us with all beings, with all things. And
love and compassion and truthfulness flow out of that connectivity.

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Week 3 Q&A
The Heart Opens so You Can Go to Its Source
Q: What might I do to shift my heart from its long-time condition of not loving? There have been
several surprising awakenings, during which there was not even a concept of self, and all was well.
Spirit lived consciously through the thoughts, words, and acts of this body for a couple of weeks on a
couple of occasions, and there was no sense of seeking or stress. My actions and words were naturally
and effortlessly flowing from loving-kindness. There was no fear, only gratitude, appreciation, clarity,
zero attachment, and zero need. Spirit was fully in charge, not me.
There are other times when I feel no love in my heart, even though I mean no harm and try to be
helpful. There is an ever-present strong, sad ache, even when circumstances are basically good. The
feeling of love that I recall being common decades ago is almost totally absent, except perhaps with
regard to my dogs and horse.
I am not referring to the passionate love of romance. I mean that very deep and selfless well-wishing,
that benevolent care that will easily sacrifice for others’ sake, and easily give, no matter to whom.
I have had hurtful experiences with a few people whom I cared deeply for, but probably not more
than others have endured. My husband of over thirty years, as well as most of my friends, are very
kind and loving toward me. Still, I do not feel love, except when in the awake state. Instead, I
pretend and act as if I love others, and sometimes, I am not even kind at all.
This has gone on for many years and has been the source of my greatest sorrow. I have prayed about
it, meditated, and done spiritual inquiry. I have studied and volunteered with you for almost ten
years. What is wrong with me? I feel my heart is truly broken.
A: Thank you for your question and all of your volunteering over the years. Instead of trying to
change or even open your heart, make this your practice: Every day, take time to listen to your heart.
Be the resource of your heart. What does it long for? What does it need?
Listen to it without judgment. Listen to its loves and its hates and its fears and its joys. Don’t indulge
it, don’t judge it, don’t baby it, don’t blame it. Just listen and let it unfold. Be what it needs you to be
for it—not what it wants you to be, but what it needs you to be.
Let go of any agenda to fix it or change it. Just listen and be, every day.
The heart opens so that you can go to its source.

Grace Cannot Be Given from the Outside

Q: I have participated in every one of your courses since I first started seeing you two years ago, and
I consider you as basically my spiritual teacher. However, this is the first course where I feel like I
have hit a wall and have been extremely resistant to it.
I’ve been heavily on the spiritual path for ten years, have studied with many teachers, and have had
hundreds of hours of kundalini and other “spiritual experiences,” as well as a few big openings.
At my second retreat with you, I had a non-abiding awakening that was the most profound. There

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were a few months of no desire to “do” (spiritual or story world) and it helped with the final stages of
my story life falling apart. It also made me not “seek” anymore for a while.
At the last retreat, I hit a wall and just felt done. I have felt that way ever since, with zero desire to do
anything spiritual, no meditating, no listening to any recordings.
I had a projection with you at the retreat, due to a comment you made. Although I recognized that as
my childhood stuff, I did get a slightly different perspective: “If Adya isn’t perfect, there is no one but
me.” So it seems very possible that I am at a standstill due to touching into a deeper layer by the realization
that you can’t be my savior. But it’s equally possible that I have been “doing” too much and just need to
shelve this spiritual stuff for a while.
My question is: Am I resistant because I need a break from all this spiritual work, or am I resistant
because of my childhood stuff (of which there was a lot)?
A: As I’m sure you’ve heard me say in the past, often the answer to a question is in the question
itself. So here’s what you wrote to me:
So it seems very possible that I am at a standstill due to touching into a deeper layer by the realization that
you can’t be my savior. But it’s equally possible that I have been ‘doing’ too much and just need to shelve
this spiritual stuff for a while.
The realization that I cannot be your savior and that I may not ascend to the throne of utter
perfection could indeed trigger some resistance. There is a deep-seated hope that someone can save
us, can give us freedom. But while we can certainly be helped along the way, and certain perspectives
can be transmitted from teacher to student if we are open and ready, no one can give us the truth of
our being. That is up to the grace of silence.
When we finally sink completely into the silence of our being, there is a grace there that cannot be
given from anything or anyone on the outside. It is innate to silence. This is the great surrender, the
highest form of devotion.
It is also possible that you need to give yourself time to integrate everything that you’ve done over the
last ten years. That doesn’t mean to check out of spirituality altogether. It means that you probably
need some time in silence, free from more input for a while. Make silence your practice for a while,
and stop feeding more spiritual input into yourself. Just be quiet in meditation. Do it for six months
and then see how things look after that.
If we’re not careful, we can unknowingly be using spiritual teachings as a means of not surrendering
to the silence of our being. Silence is the great teacher, the inner guru.
Lastly, this course material challenges us to close the gap between being and doing. And there is often
an unconscious resistance to doing this, because it takes spirituality out of the inner domain and into
what is often the ego’s prime real estate, our everyday lives. In doing so, it gives the ego nowhere to
operate. It makes all of life the territory of truth, and there is no ground for the ego to call its own.
From the ego’s point of view, this needs to be resisted at all costs, even if it costs us our happiness.
But from the view of spirit, this is the greatest possible outcome. It is a life of truth, love, and
freedom. It is not only what our true being wants—it is what it is.
As always, I trust you to your own silent intuition in all these matters. And I wish you peace and happiness.

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Embodiment Practices to Nourish and Welcome the Spirit
Q: Can you please recommend a body-based embodiment practice? I am seeking a specific practice
(or set of practices) that nourishes and welcomes spirit (opening to the incarnation of spirit).
A: Mukti and I plan to film a video of Qigong practices in the next couple of months to post on
our website. In general, I feel that both Tai Chi and Qigong exercises are great, as well as basic
yoga postures. All of these exercises clear and open up the energy channels in the body, as well as
developing strength and flexibility.

A Major Shift of Identity and Orientation

Q: At the beginning of Session 3, you discussed what I recall to be a kind of stepping in and out of
some kind of experience.
After I saw “Amy” really clearly and obviously, the initial awareness of that was intense, sudden,
and unexpected. Not only was “Amy” really, obviously, not me, but there was this sensation in my
chest/heart space of anxiety/restlessness that melted into something beautiful and moved deep down
into my lower belly. It was clear that this is where I reside. It felt solid and unshakeable, and I felt
humbled and still. In fact, I didn’t even know there was restlessness in my chest until it was gone.
While I have no doubt that something profound took place and changed Amy, the contrast has lost
its intensity. Is that because the “newness” has worn off?
It feels as though I am spending much time feeling one way, but mentally doubting it all the time
as well. I don’t feel completely out, but I don’t feel completely in either. The only thing I know for
certain is that I used to be one way in the world and then, one day, I started to be a different way. I
started interacting and perceiving everything differently. That initial sense of an oak tree rooted in the
earth has softened—not gone, but not full.
At times, it feels like there are still lingering “flavors of Amy,” but when I see how I am in the world,
I hold a deeply profound fondness for myself and others. So far, everything you have shared has been
extremely helpful, but I still have this uncertainty. Where am I? What’s happening? Old flavors still
linger and cloud the soup.
A: Thank you for sharing your experience and for your questions. I could give many pages of
response, but for the sake of brevity I’ll cut to the chase. You asked:
So far, everything you have shared has been extremely helpful, but I still have this uncertainty. Where am I?
What’s happening?
You awoke from the dream of Amy. Just that is a titanic reorientation for your entire being. Every
aspect of life unconsciously orients itself around who and what we experience ourself to be. So to
have a fundamental shift away from a conceptual identity (Amy) is a major shift, not only of identity
but also of physical, mental, and emotional orientation. The background anxiety and restlessness that
melted away is the somatic feeling of separation that was Amy.
To feel somewhat disoriented for a while (weeks, months, or years) is common and to be expected.
The more you let the whole process happen of its own accord, the quicker your system will adapt.
You mentioned that the intensity of the newness of the experience has melted away, and this also is

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to be expected. Whatever is new only feels new for a short period of time. Of course, this is where
doubt often comes into the picture, questioning the validity of what happened. This level of doubt
is simply the old sense of separation trying to reconstruct itself again and has nothing to do with the
validity of the initial experience of awakening.
Old flavors still linger and cloud the soup.
Your task is to not give in to the doubt, and not expect or long for the experience to be as new, clear,
and encompassing as it initially was. Orient your awareness to the quiet and subtle ways that awake
awareness experiences itself. Be still and quiet within the stillness of awareness, and do not react when
the old traces of Amy reemerge. Just see them and let them pass. It takes months, and usually years,
for the old conditioned patterns to more or less completely drop away. Abide in the unconditioned
condition of awake being, and let the momentum of old conditioning and egocentric patterns resolve
themselves.
Don’t try to define where on the spectrum of awakening you are. You are exactly where you need to
be. Rest in the always and already awake condition of being. It may seem quite simple, but it is the
most powerful practice there is.

Resting in the Heart Deepens the Heart

Q: When I experience the presence of deep, quiet calm, I struggle with my mind to find words to
say in conversation with others. Paying attention and feeling the heart seems to be the key, and then
the words seem to be spontaneous and I become as a witness to self. For words to come, I need a
deep intimacy with the moment. How can I deepen that?
A: As is often the case, the answer is within your question. Simply rest your attention in the heart,
and make that your practice. Do it all the time, no matter what you are doing. Attention deepens
attention, as resting in the heart deepens the heart. Keep it very simple but committed. Then
whatever you say will express the attentive heart, the intimacy of silent connection and communion.

Are Moral Values Also Soul Values?

Q: I listened to one of your recordings in Café Dharma called The Basic Teachings: Principles of the
Teaching, which has helped me to formalize my questions and has been very great to hear.
These are beginner questions, but they are surfacing because I am participating in this class.
If we are still in the ego state and have not yet realized that we are conscious spirit, is making a
conscious effort to live truth, compassion, and love (which are held by conscious spirit as valuable
and awakened) the way to begin? If I begin there, am I still approaching this process from moral
values? If so, is this the place to start?
Until I have awakened to what I truly am, I do not know what else I can do to apply what we are
learning in this course.
Adya, is it okay to be this way? Otherwise, I will need to wait until I am realized, and that is okay too.
A: I’m going to copy your email below with my responses intermixed with your questions.
These are beginner questions, but they are surfacing because I am participating in this class.

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Please always stay in beginner’s mind. Your sincerity and humility are a breath of fresh air. May we all
remain beginners. May we all dwell in the unknown ground of being. May all of our actions come
forth from that innocent and wise emptiness at the core of being.
If we are still in the ego state and have not yet realized that we are conscious spirit, is making a conscious
effort to live truth, compassion, and love (which are held by conscious spirit as valuable and awakened) the
way to begin?
It is best just to be where you are without even thinking about whether or not you have had an
awakening experience. The only thing that is relevant is how awake we are right now. And, yes, it
does take some conscious effort to embody any of the soul values. My suggestion, though, is to think
of them as being inherent within you. That way you are letting them come out of you, rather than
trying to impose them upon yourself.
So approach embodying soul values as expressing in daily life the honesty, love, peace, gratitude,
harmony, etc., that are within you. And express them as simply and effortlessly as you can. Think of
it as an effortless effort—just enough effort to accomplish the task, but no more effort than necessary.
If I begin there, am I still approaching this process from moral values? If so, is this the place to start?
I only suggest not approaching soul values as moral values to avoid the guilt and shame that many
people have associated with morality. The soul values are expressions of our true being, but they are
surely also moral values. They form the moral structure of a sane, happy, and loving life. There is
nothing wrong with seeing them as moral virtues, because they are moral virtues.
The amazing thing is that these moral virtues are not just social constraints for the ego. They are
actually inherent aspects of our true being. I find this to be amazing and wonderful! If relating to
them as moral values works for you, then by all means do so. And do it with love, patience, and
forgiveness.
Adya, is it okay to be this way? Otherwise, I will need to wait until I am realized, and that is okay too.
You never need to wait until you are awakened. Don’t put awakened people on a pedestal. We are
all fallible and human, and as I say, the only relevant thing is how conscious any of us are at any
moment.
You are now and already the infinite whether you know it or not. Soul values are simply expressions
of your infinite being. They are good for you, and they are good for all beings everywhere. Whenever
you are embodying and expressing love, peace, or gratitude in a selfless way, you are being a clear
expression of infinite being in the world. At that very moment, you are a redeeming presence in the
world.

Abide before Any Beliefs

Q: I have this strong belief that people themselves are responsible for suffering or joy. So, I am
almost never interested in the outside world and people, even in terms of service. I feel I have no
responsibility. This leads me to question how I can affect or change anybody or the world while
working from my true place. I feel helpless while seeing people suffer, because I ask myself how the
blind can lead the blind.

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A: Drop “this strong belief.” It is getting between you and life. Is it possible to meet each moment as
it is with no intervening belief? What is your response to life then?
Just abide before any beliefs, before all stories. Abide in that silence, in that innocence, and let your
actions flow from there. Please enjoy your life.

The Difference between Role and Persona

Q: The soul value that I’m working with is commitment. I’ve recently started a new job, which is
uncomfortable. It’s helping me see how I’m hooked up to please people. Of course, my idea of what
it means to please people is an idea. My belief is that I’m expected to be something—to present a
persona—when what feels natural is to be quiet unless I have something to say. I feel like a fraud
when I go against this natural state and fill the silence when I really have nothing to say.
I think that putting my soul value into practice in this case is committing to being uncomfortable. Is
this where the rubber hits the road?
A: Your soul value of commitment is a wonderful and challenging value to embody. In a sense,
commitment is the underlying value of all other soul values because it takes great commitment
(devotion) to embody any soul value with consistency in everyday life. To be committed with great
devotion is so very essential for transcending egocentricity.
All soul values require not only commitment but authenticity as well, for all soul values are manifest
expressions of one’s authentic (or true) being and are essential to developing spiritual autonomy. A
question to ask yourself is “Does my job require me to be someone that I am not, or does it require
me to be fulfill a role while at work?” So often, what we think other people want us to be is in fact
our own attachment to a given persona, and a fear of simply being who we are.
Many jobs require you to embody a given role. We will, in fact, all have different roles to play in life
as well as at work, such as father, mother, teacher, student, doctor, electrician, etc. But these roles are
essentially functions. They are not who you are, they are what you are doing. So the roles (functions)
that we play in life can be embodied from a very authentic and non-attached place inside. You can
be who you are while embodying a given role. It is important to understand the difference between
a role and a persona. A persona is a mask. It is pretending to be who you are not, while a role is a
function that you embody.
Right now, I am embodying the role of teacher. This role, however, is not who I am; it is a function I
carry out to the best of my ability. I express my authentic being through this role and hopefully it is
of benefit to others. But at no point do I ever forget that “teacher” is not my true being. It is nothing
to identify with. We can better embody whatever roles we play in life when we do not fall into the
trap of identifying with the role. So we need to be very clear about the difference between a role, a
persona, and our true being. All should flow forth from our true being; otherwise, we will feel overly
identified with either a role we are embodying or the false persona of the egocentric orientation.
No matter what you are doing in life, your primary commitment is to the truth of being and to
embodying the values of soul, which are the relative expressions of your true nature. If your true
nature is to be quiet, then be quiet. As you suggested in your email, perhaps it is you who are more
uncomfortable with being quiet around others than those around you are. Be okay with being a bit

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nervous at your new job. It’s completely natural. Say yes to the nervousness, and it will naturally
dissipate. When you are okay with yourself, most people will be okay with you, too.
By the way, my Buddhist name is Silent Wind. I imagine I was given that name because I was so
quiet. Watch out for the quiet ones though—you never know what’s inside them.

Imbuing Soul Values with Wisdom

Q: My question pertains to imbuing my soul values with wisdom, which seems to be necessary.
When I truly act through my soul values, which are compassion and truth, I realize that there is skill
or wisdom required.
I believe you said that love (which I equate with compassion) without truth can get messy, and truth
without love can be harsh. In practice, I have been on both the receiving and giving end of that
messy and harsh experience. Although I value wisdom, I can’t really say it automatically accompanies
my core values the same way that truth and compassion go together for me.
A: Wisdom, or what is called prajna in Zen, arises from the unification of body, mind, and spirit.
It arises from a state of complete non-attachment, even non-attachment to spiritual experience and
insight. When there is no attachment or aversion to whatever is happening, there is no separation
from it. You are whatever is happening, the entire unfolding moment. You do not stand apart from
it, nor do you indulge in any part of it. There is just the moment responding to itself.
Truth and love are bridges to prajna and are therefore the two most fundamental soul values. We
usually think of truth as either a fact or an insight, but these are not absolute truths. Not even
insight is absolute. For these truths are truths of the past. Absolute truth or wisdom has no past and
therefore is a state of complete unknowingness, total availability.
If you rest in any form of knowing, no matter how profound, you are not resting in absolute truth.
When abiding in the unknowingness of absolute truth, you are simply the totality of the moment.
Then the moment itself spontaneously moves and expresses itself through and as you. This is not
mere impulse, which is simply self-indulgent uncontrolled conditioning.
Prajna is the wisdom of the moment revealing itself, embodying itself in undivided response. This can
only happen when you are not invested in any point of view, outcome, or competition.
Truth as a bridge to prajna (wisdom) means complete open-mindedness, total honesty and non-
attachment to any point of view. It means to be completely real, transparent, and in perfect integrity
without residing in premature conclusion.
Love as a bridge to prajna means to be completely openhearted, genuine, and sincere. It means to be
connected, versatile, and responsive to the moment, while embodying scrupulous non-attachment to
outcome.
Practicing these two soul values with great care will put you in the atmosphere of spontaneously
arising wisdom.

Your True Being Has No History

Q: All my life, I never understood why my parents made me feel like a complete stranger in

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their home. They never visited my schools, asked about my interests, or asked what I liked or
disliked. Deep within me resided the pain of knowing my parents knew nothing whatsoever
about my existence. I was like an empty hanger in a dark closet. This sad state never changed. My
unconsciousness and self-doubt were certainly part of the failure of my marriage as well.
In the middle of last night, out of the blue, a new insight appeared. Yes, I recognized, it would be
good to have parents who showed more interest in who I was. But now, in this very moment, I was
being asked to see things newly and ask myself, “What have I really missed, and what is there to
grieve about now?” Even if my parents had known something about me, they would have known
only my relative being—my varied masks, my personality, my untruths, my illusions, conditioning,
and misunderstandings. I can now also see more clearly how my parents were like little children in
grown-up clothing and just weren’t able to do any better. They gave me all they could.
Do you think this new awareness makes sense after all these years of “crying over spilled milk”?
I do feel there’s a new beginning and ending to this lifetime issue. I am hopeful and sincerely pray
that the old grievances can truly be buried, even now at age ninety, letting go of the old regrets
once and for all. The message appears to be to move on and not let false roadblocks bar the road to
ultimate freedom and peace.
A: Thank you for your question and for sharing your wonderful insight. That within us which so
desperately seeks to be acknowledged is our relative being, our ego. Although it is nice to have our
relative being be seen and acknowledged, it is never quite enough, because our ego, our image of
ourself, is found primarily through the reflections that others give us. It is not our true being and so
it cannot be truly satisfied with anything less than awakening from its own self-created dream.
The ego leaves us feeling terribly vulnerable because those who have a good image of us can always
change their minds about us, and frequently do. Your true being, however, is in no way defined by
your ego’s image of itself, nor is it found in the image others have of you.
Who knows, maybe not having your parents acknowledge you as much as you wanted them to when
you were a child gave you the inclination to look inside, beyond all self-images, whether they be
yours or others’. In the end, it is actual life, whether easy or difficult, that provides the opportunities
to awaken from the dream of self to our true being.
Good for you—no more crying over spilled milk. Let a new life, a new vision, bloom. Your true
being has no history, no past or future. It is the timeless awareness of now. And it has no past
grievance, no resentful relationship to what was. It is, and that is enough. How few people know the
absolute joy of having no image, no dream of self, no idea or thing to hold onto. To be imageless,
formless, conscious, and free, is to regain our true being. Then we meet ourself in every face we see.

The Timeless Fire of Now

Q: I’ve had a lot of trouble narrowing my soul value down to a word or phrase. My deepest
experience of beingness is that wordless state of the absolute. Living in (or as) that is so different from
my everyday experience that it’s clear I can’t cause it or reconstruct it.
I’ve thought about the “attributes” that arise with that undivided state and they are the usual words:
completely attuned, without commentary, open transparency, absolute clarity, and many more. But

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I realize that they are all too abstract and really just another detour for a mind that has loved and
explored every “spiritualized” way of avoiding whatever it doesn’t want to see.
After much soul searching, I did arrive at my soul value, which is radical innocence. I am really
terrified by it! I know it’s the one, but it brings up every single thing I’ve protected myself against for
a lifetime. It carries all of the judgment of this culture towards “innocence” and it carries the whole
conditioning of my childhood as well. It also returns me to that unconditioned beingness I’m so
longing to inhabit all the time, not just during those wonderful shifts in perception. I’m ready to do
this! But I think I could use some help.
A: Innocence is an attitude or state of mind from which soul values can be embodied in daily
life. You need to be mindful that the innocence of a child is different from the innocence of spirit.
Children are innocent in a beautiful yet unconscious and vulnerable way. They have not lived enough
yet to be innocent in a deeper and more mature sense.
Children have the innocence that comes from a lack of experience. Spiritual innocence, however, is
the outcome of wisdom and insight and is not vulnerable like a child’s innocence. So it’s important to
understand that you are not trying to embody the innocence of a child, but rather the innocence of a
spiritually mature human being.
The soul values are different from the attributes of the ground of being. Attributes are experiential
descriptions of being, while soul values are relative expressions of being in time and space. Reality has
its absolute and relative aspects. “Relative” in this context does not mean less real or less valuable. It
simply means the ever-changing face of reality, or eternity. And it is the world that we live in, or that
lives in us, depending on your point of view.
To realize the absolute ground of being is to experience a freedom from samsara, while to realize the
true nature of duality (enlightened duality) is to experience a freedom to fearlessly engage in samsara.
Freedom to is a much greater freedom than freedom from. They are both essential freedoms, however,
and innate to the enlightened condition.
In a more human context, there is the freedom from fear, and the freedom to transcend fear through
the total embrace of fear. To find freedom from fear in the relative world of time and space is
a human agenda, not a spiritual one. The spiritual agenda (if one can talk in these terms) is to
embody selfless love and truth in the world. When it is highly developed, this brings about a state of
fearlessness, which is different from the fearless state of the transcendent ground of being.
Relative fearlessness is something more like unwavering courage than a total absence of fear. In the
enlightened condition, one is no longer afraid of experiencing fear, and therefore fear has no foothold
in such a person. Fear no longer stands in the way of the expression of one’s true nature.
So be courageous. The past only resides in the present to the exact extent that you recreate it in the
present. To be innocent is to be here as if for the first time, with no attachment to the past. Each
moment is actually ever new.
Contrary to the conditioned outlook, the present does not flow out of the past. The past has always,
and is always, flowing out of the present.
Imagine that your experience of the past, whatever that might be, is being created in the present
moment. Since it is being created in the present moment, you can stop creating it. Just abide in the

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ever-new, uncreated, timeless instant, where arising and falling away are simultaneously occurring.
Let every instant arise completely, and every instant disappear completely. Be like a fire that burns
absolutely clean, leaving no ash behind. Then there is no past, no present even, and no future—just
the timeless fire of now.

Dealing with Social Anxiety

Q: I think truth is my question, but I stumble in my conviction, as it seems truth must be for
everyone. I’m having difficulty practicing my core value to the depth I want because of social anxiety.
I want to always act from love, but I find myself acting from fear and a sort of hard-heartedness
because that is how I feel in the moment.
It used to be very easy for me to act from love and listen deeply to others in conversation, giving
them my full attention. Years ago I told myself that if I truly wanted to find God I had to deeply love
Him as He appears. Can I see Him in the next person I speak to? Can I give them the same devotion
and love I afford to God? I did this practice and was very devoted to it. I grew more in those months
than I ever have in my life. I stopped, however, because of a few traumas that occurred at that time.
I want to renew that sense of devotion I had to this practice and to others, but I am finding it hard to
love with the same depth I once possessed.
A: I suggest that you start by choosing to engage in social situations that feel like a bit of a stretch for
you, but that will not trigger too much anxiety. Choose to engage in them consciously and at your
own pace, so that your body/mind gets to experience that social situations can, in fact, be safe.
Start very small and slowly build up to more challenging social engagements, always being mindful
of not triggering too much fear and anxiety at any one time. Over time, your body/mind will reset
its fight-or-flight response to a more natural and functional level. Take it slow and easy, but also
challenge yourself in small doses.

The Inner Critic Is Like an Ill-Tempered Child

Q: I am struggling to understand how to stand up to the inner critic, especially as my practice has
been to be very allowing moment-by-moment. I see that by allowing and accepting the inner critic,
I have fallen prey to its incessant bullying. I guess standing up means not believing it? How can I do
this without causing division and without resisting?
A: Think of this course as applied or manifest moment-to-moment allowing. You are not pushing or
imposing anything upon yourself. This is very important to understand. You are allowing the truth,
or love, or peace, or trust, or unity, to be expressed in your words and actions in your daily life.
The inner critic is a lot like an ill-tempered child, and an intellectual and emotional bully. It’s an old
emotionally charged and conditioned mental narrative. If it remains unchallenged, it runs riot over
your life, judging and demeaning you at every turn. It takes both strength (to stand up to it) and love
(to reconnect with the heart) to overcome it.
See the critic for what it is. It seeks conflict and division by taking you out of your heart, out of
peace, out of wisdom, out of love, and out of connection. The inner critic’s main purpose is to
disconnect and shield you from love. It is to make you weak and emotionally charged so that it can

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control you, and then blame you for being controlled. Its prime desire is for division. It is a primary
mover of the wheel of samsara.
In this course, you are given the opportunity to choose something other than the inner critic. By
choosing to abide and express the values of soul (your true and inherent being), you are choosing
what you yourself most deeply value in your heart over any other conditioned story. You are valuing
the values of soul over those of the critic, the judge, the victim, or any other script of samsara.
To reject and not believe in the old judgmental scripts takes courage, love, and vigilance. It takes the
values of soul.

Life Has Brought You Here

Q: I was very excited about this course, but I find myself spending much of broadcast sessions in
tears. I don’t know what is being asked of me here. I feel judged, challenged, and fully inadequate.
I don’t believe life would have brought me here if it were inappropriate. I’m more intuitive than
intellectual and am not very good with articulation of spiritual matters. I just feel very overwhelmed
and overwhelmingly unintelligent.
Your best advice (which seems to apply in most situations) is “Relax and trust.” OK.
A: I too don’t believe life would have brought you here if it were inappropriate. The material in this
course can very easily be taken by the wounded self and used to judge itself. I’ve cautioned against
this several times, but I understand how easy it is to hear what I am saying through the interpretive
filter of judgment.
What I am essentially teaching during this course is this: Connect with the peace and love in your
heart and experiment with manifesting it more often and more clearly in your daily life—all the
while, knowing that you will do so imperfectly and intermittently, and that’s perfectly all right. A
little loving peace is one hundred percent more than none at all.
Since you are very intuitive, let me suggest that you first connect with the felt sense and presence of
love, or peace, or honesty within yourself. Then do three actions each day, no matter how small or
insignificant, which in some way express one or more of these felt-sense soul values.
When and if self-judgment arises, meet the judgment with the same attitude of love, peace, or
honesty that you chose to work with. Don’t judge your judgment; simply meet it with love and
understanding.
And lastly, I’d suggest listening to the first broadcast again and noticing if I actually encourage
anyone to judge themselves. It may be helpful to see how powerful a filter the mind can be until we
question it. Of course, don’t judge the judging mind or demean it. Simply see it for what it is: very
old conditioning looking to be free.
I hope that by making a few adjustments you will begin to enjoy this course, even though it can be
challenging at times. This course is about manifesting and expressing our inherent wholeness and
completeness of being. That to me is love in action.

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Choosing A New Life Direction
Q: Recently, while meditating, the mind offered what I thought to be direction toward a specific career
choice. It felt like a breeze, as you mentioned, or a soft whisper. The response was a simple “Okay.”
Since then, I have taken steps toward this new direction, and in the process have run into some doubt
and uncertainty. I don’t know that it is really what I would have chosen for myself, but I thought that
since the idea may have come from beyond myself, I would make the sacrifice to serve it anyway.
I’m at the end of the first college course now, and it has felt really good to think that I am serving
something beyond myself. It has also felt very good to have the sense of direction. I learned a great
deal about myself while involved in this one course, which has been fun. And yet the doubt and
uncertainty have grown even stronger, given the system and content of this particular line of work.
I’m 42 years old, and quite honestly, I don’t want to waste any more energy, time, or money on
seeking out the ideal career. I’m starting to think that I’ve been chasing my docked tail in this
endeavor. I don’t really care about money so much as I do the service and contribution. Is there the
thing that we are each meant to do with our lives? Can we get it wrong?

A: Choosing new life directions can seem so very intimidating. We look for certainty where there
is none. And yet, you cannot get your life wrong. You must choose your direction, of course, but
ultimately the “me” is not in control.
The unconscious influences, both inwardly and outwardly, that are at work in even the simplest of
decisions are unfathomable. The ultimate cause for any moment being the way that it is, is literally
because the entire cosmos is the way that it is. And yet there you are faced with the very human
question about whether or not you are going in the right direction.
Life is made up of numberless moments of collision between the infinite all (the absolute) and the
particular (relative) me. They are actually the same thing but appear to be different.
For the sake of perspective, imagine that you, whatever you imagine yourself to be, are actually a
momentary expression of the entire cosmos and beyond. All of the forces of existence are at each
moment coming together and interacting to produce the next manifest blip called this moment, as
well as the next moment, and . . . you get the point.
Imagine that your dilemma about what career direction to take is actually one of the gazillions of
decisions the cosmos is making each and every second. And it is making them without any self-
reflection; it only feels like it’s you making the decisions. Whether or not it actually is you making
decisions is entirely dependent on how you experience and define yourself.
So with this in mind, notice the relief you feel at knowing that you as an individual cannot get life
wrong or miss doing what you are meant to do. You can feel as if you got it wrong or missed doing
what you were meant to do, but those feelings are just a manifestation of the thoughts you believe.
Have you ever noticed how sometimes a so-called bad decision leads to more growth and evolution
than the so-called right decision might have? Even so, you (however you define yourself ) still have
decisions to make and want to make the best ones that you can.

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Here is a sentence from your email: I don’t really care about money so much as I do about the service and
contribution. So perhaps you’d be best served by choosing a career path that allows you to “serve and
contribute” in a way that feels the most connected to your values and compatible with your heart.
My advice is to never go in a direction that is incompatible with your values or in conflict with your
heart—all the while knowing (or perhaps imagining) that you can’t ultimately get it wrong. Now,
there’s a paradox to live!

Fear is Okay—It’s Just Fear

Q: The values I’m working with are authenticity and faith. The situation I’m in is that I am with
my sister and brother-in-law at their home where she is in the early days of recovering from a bone
marrow transplant treatment for lymphoma. What feels authentic to me is trusting presence in the
moment to bring healing at the heart level. Who knows what will happen at the physical level? I
surrender outcomes over and over.
You asked us what obstacles occur to fully manifesting our soul value. In meditation I pass through
grief, and hope to the shift when “I am” is a mystery. But the obstacle is a kind of panic in the center
of me. I manage to float a little above it and bring a lot of presence and silence, which is already a
gift of real value to my family. But that panic is right there. Just asking this question makes my palms
sweat. I’d like to pass through that. I think it would free a lot of energy and love.
You said that resistance is similar to feeding it. I know this and don’t want it, but I am terrified to
just stare it down. I also know that I am going to have to heal it or listen to it somehow without
panicking!
A: First let me express my heartfelt wishes for your sister’s recovery. Part of supporting someone
through challenging times is knowing that you cannot control the outcome for them no matter
how deeply you support and love them. Everything and everyone in life is so very ephemeral,
and sometimes the fragility of life becomes heightened. To encounter the ephemeral, or even the
possibility of the ephemeral nature of someone that you care deeply for, will elicit whatever fears you
have about death.
Fear is okay. It’s just fear. It’s just you encountering the ephemeral nature of existence. Meet the fear
with the love that you have for your sister. It’s love that faces fear. Don’t meet your fear with fear,
meet fear with love. When you meet with your fears, you are also meeting with the uncontrollable
nature of life. We cannot control life, and death is a part of life. So by meeting fear, you are being
asked to let go of trying to control life, to control outcome. But remember, you are only letting go of
the attempt to control life, because you cannot actually control life anyway.
So when you meet the fear of the ephemeral nature of existence, you are also meeting with the
uncontrollability of life. You cannot control the transient nature of existence. So don’t try to meet
fear from the “me,” because then you only have more fear. Meet fear from love, because love can
acknowledge transience as well as the fact that you cannot control outcomes. Love simply says yes to
fear, yes to transience, yes to letting go.
Whatever you can authentically say yes to, you are no longer controlled by. So maybe you feel this

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fear, but you can say yes to it. Yes, I am willing to be afraid. I am willing to be afraid because I love
my sister. And that is love. Love can free you from your own fear and resistance.
It’s a paradox. When you are willing to feel fear out of love, then the fear subsides because it cannot
hold you. And if you are not willing to feel fear because you are trying to protect yourself from the
feeling, you are trapped in your fear. So connect with your love—your love for your sister, your love
for yourself, and your love for all beings. Love is a much greater power than fear, which is why love
can overcome fear.

Soul Values Arise from Devotion

Q: During this course, personal will kept falling away, and I was unable to find, sustain, grasp, or
practice any one particular soul value for very long in the way you had instructed.
Something intuitively was inclining to what I might call a “beautiful thread” that turned out to be
experientially the deepest soul value for me. It was beyond language and concept, felt and known
experientially, and yet, paradoxically, it was also not an experience. Seeking an understanding or
reference point for later, the mind tried to ask, “What is this value?” But it was unnameable.
Then there was a sudden realization: “I cannot actually see or name this deepest value because I
am that deepest value. That is what I am.” There was great surprise and joy in this revelation. Even
though this experience faded, it has left an energetic imprint as a bridge for me to use to reconnect
with this enigmatic, unnameable, and very precious soul value.
I am noticing how the whole “cluster” of soul values is already there in the heart. I love how
they shine forth and offer and serve the moment with whatever quality may be called for, either
spontaneously or by my conscious attention and devotion. This feels profoundly different from the
mind trying to figure it all out.
This intuitive path back to my depth feels like my being’s deep love for itself, energetically homing in
on its deepest experience of being, finding its delight in its deep self, no matter what. This devotion
of being to itself seems to be as inherent as the soul values themselves.
I’m really starting to feel what it is like to let go into this intuition, which follows the path of love
and beauty, that beautiful thread that brings the brightness of my depth into every single, ordinary
moment.
A: Thank you for your email. I am posting it here because I think that it might resonate and be
of some positive help to others in this course. As you so beautifully expressed, to find one’s deepest
experience of being is an inquiry unto itself. And what a surprise to find that what we are calling soul
values are actually expressions of one’s own being. Indeed, you are the soul values as well as their source.
In order to be authentic, this entire practice needs to be rooted in the experience of being, the intuitive sense
of one’s own depth and silence and emptiness-fullness. That is the ground from which the soul values arise.
You could think of soul values as the initial manifest movements or expressions of the ground of being.
They are intuitive and nonconceptual until they take form in the mind. But the soul values must always
be worked with from a sense of devotion, a deep and abiding love and devotion to truth and love in all
their forms. In fact, it is the depth of devotion that dictates how deeply the values will be embodied.

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So as you noticed, to abide in the depth and ground of one’s own being is the primary practice, the
primary devotion. And out of that devotion, the soul values arise as ways and expressions of being.
They are movements of stillness and expressions of silence arising from a ground of love and caring.
You could think of soul values as the initial manifest movements or expressions of the ground of
being. They are intuitive and nonconceptual until they take form in the mind. But the soul values
must always be worked with from a sense of devotion, a deep and abiding love and devotion to truth
and love in all their forms. In fact, it is the depth of devotion that dictates how deeply the values will
be embodied.
So as you noticed, to abide in the depth and ground of one’s own being is the primary practice, the
primary devotion. And out of that devotion, the soul values arise as ways and expressions of being.
They are movements of stillness and expressions of silence arising from a ground of love and caring.

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WEEK FOUR
Notes from Adyashanti
The Absolute Transcendence of Meaning (as opposed to meaninglessness) - In the absolute,
meaning is completely transcended, because in the absolute there is no self to assign meaning. There
is only the nothingness or no-thing-ness of being, meaning that the empty and formless nature of
existence is all that perspective, life is not experienced as meaningless; it’s simply that meaning or its
opposite does not exist.
Enlightened Relativity - Our relative, or human, nature can and does experience meaning or the
absence of meaning. From the perspective of enlightened relativity we both transcend and experience
meaning. Life is experienced as both with and without meaning simultaneously. The meaning that
is experienced is not a philosophical meaning; it is not an idea that we impose upon life. Rather,
the meaning that is experienced is the simple awe and wonder of existence that we experience when
we are in alignment with being. Life is its own meaning when experienced directly and intimately,
free of the egocentric filters of separation. Only the egocentric filters of separation can experience
life as negatively meaningless. The view from enlightened relativity is the coming together of all the
opposites into a unitary whole.
The Infinite Is the Ultimate Ground of Both the Absolute and the Relative Perspectives - One
can think of the infinite as a void of pure unmanifest potentiality; the ground, source, and suchness
of all existence; and the mother of both the relative and absolute perspectives. It is the emptiness of
emptiness and the fullness of fullness. It is all-embracing, all-transcending, point-of-viewless reality.
Nothing can really be said or even conceptualized about the infinite in regards to meaning. For
meaning is neither present nor absent from the infinite, because it is literally beyond any form of
conceptual description, understanding, or experience. How then can it be known? The infinite has a
simple intuitive regard for itself from within all of itself. I am afraid that I cannot say anymore than
that, and I’ve almost certainly said too much already.
The Discovery of Meaning - Our existence is experienced to be meaningful in direct proportion to
how much truth and love we embody. It is we who give life meaning or leave it feeling meaningless.
It is we who literally light up and create our entire experience of the world. Every tree, every leaf,
every sunset, every star, every blade of grass is a creation of mind. We are both genesis and the
apocalypse happening every instant.
Within Each of Our Forms Lies the Existential Mystery of Being - Apart from one’s physical
appearance, personality, gender, history, occupation, hopes and dreams, comings and goings, there
lies an eerie silence, an abyss of stillness charged with an etheric presence. For all of our anxious
business and obsession with triviality, we cannot completely deny this phantasmal essence at our
core. And yet we do everything we can to avoid its stillness, its silence, its utter emptiness and radiant
intimacy.
Being is that which disturbs our insistence on remaining in the life-numbing realm of our secret
desperation. It is the itch that cannot be scratched, the whisper that will not be denied. To be, to
truly be, is not a given.

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The Importance of Proper Life Orientation - The proper life orientation, from the perspective
of being (or spirit), is not one of conventional morality, although conventional morality remains
as a background orientation. The moral orientation from the perspective of being is love—not
strict adherence to moral law, but rather the active embodiment of the enlightened condition, the
condition of being. Being is not oriented by the dualistic judgments of right and wrong; it is oriented
by the awakened vision of self-transcending love and wisdom.
Your Mode of Being - Get your mode of being in the world oriented around the self-transcending
love and wisdom of being, and you will experience life to be a rich, meaningful, creative and
inspiring adventure. This does not mean that life will necessarily be easy; it means that it will
fundamentally be experienced as rich, meaningful, creative, and inspiring. Excessive psychological
suffering is a clear indication that one’s mode of being in the world is in conflict with being and life
as it is. Suffering is the feedback loop between you and life that tells you that your mode of being is
misaligned, meaning that your values (literally what you value) and your beliefs are out of harmony
with being, the underlying nature of both you and all of existence.
Forgiveness - Forgiveness is an embodied expression of selfless love, wisdom, and nonattachment.
It is a redemptive act that restores the one who forgives to their natural state of being, the self-
transcendent state of wholeness, love, truth (wisdom), and freedom.
Forgiveness is the most powerful way to free yourself from the past, heal old emotional wounds, and
restore your spirit to its natural state of well-being. Forgiveness is not just something that we offer
to others; it is of the greatest importance to forgive oneself as well. Forgiveness does not ignore past
wrongdoings, it brings healing to them. It allows the one who forgives, as well as the one who is
forgiven, to move on from being trapped in the past by restoring one’s dignity and empowering one’s
life with the light of love. Forgiveness is an expression of one of the most powerful psychological laws
in the universe: we get what we give.

Session 4 Notes
What this Course Is Evoking
• Here’s what the course is trying to evoke in you:
1. Taking the one seat, which is to fully occupy your life. This is one of the biggest challenges
as a human, as it takes deep spirituality to understand what occupation means. It takes
more than an awakening to embody the depth in your mode of being in the world.
2. Spiritual autonomy.
3. Discovering the soul’s meaning by working with your soul values and embodying them
in the daily moments of your life.

Intuit Being Now

• The more we embody soul, the more we embody being itself.
• Other terms for being could be awareness or consciousness, but “being” can’t be given a precise
definition. It’s more important to experience what the word is pointing to.

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 • “Being” is the easiest thing in our experience to discount because it is silent and has no form.
However, to discount it comes at a great price because we dismiss our own being.
• In profound moments of revelation, being comes to the foreground in the intensity of knowing
oneself as “that.”
• There is no need to wait for a big experience to intuit being.
• Unless we have the capacity to experience our own being and aliveness, we’re really missing
the chance to take a full seat in our lives. We then become just our name, gender, and
occupation, which are mere ideas.
• “Being” is not just a blissful quiet, but it’s also what is here and present now.
• At the level of being, we are all the same. Although this is a simple, beautiful, and ordinary
truth, how do we live it and respond to each moment, not just the special ones?

How Values Dictate Your Mode of Being

• There are two aspects of our being—the quiet interior, and the outer. We bring these two
aspects together through our soul values.
• Our egos value such things as being worthy and being the best, but your being is also oriented
toward your self-transcendent values such as integrity, honesty, and service.
• Your beliefs and values dictate your mode of being in the world, although most people don’t pay
attention to this truth.
• When what you value through desire and craving leads to separation, this leads to unnecessary
suffering. This mode of being is out of alignment and out of harmony with being.
• At every moment, we are giving expression to what we value, what we are holding as
important.
• If you don’t like the way your life is going, look at what you value and your choices of action.
• Often, what we do shows us the discrepancy between what we think we value and what we
actually value.

Moving Beyond the Inner Critic

• The inner critic is usually inherited, is conditioned, and is a bully.
• The inner critic is a mask that covers your vulnerability and often your fear.
• Moralizing disempowers you and keeps you from stepping into the presence and truth of your
being.
• The ego is a point of view that you don’t need to go to war with. Just change your point of view.
• When you stand in your own heart, you value things like love, peace, and freedom for all. You
feel in alignment and everything happens spontaneously. In this place, there is no “you” and
“life.” It is just life that is in alignment with itself. It is this spontaneity that we are aiming for in
this course.
• Very few people can be aligned all the time.

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Two Qualities of Enlightenment
• There are two qualities of enlightenment:
1. Awakening which shows us that we are always inherently what we are. There is no
becoming and no evolving.
2. Awakening from an angle of constant change and evolution.
• We are embodiments of these two dimensions of being.
• We are either awake or asleep in any moment.
• Nonduality isn’t a denial of duality; it is the embrace of both dimensions of being.
• We work with becoming, not as a goal, but to embody the deepest experience of being.
• There is an instinct to embody our depth. From this place, we suffer less and cause less suffering
for others. We are in alignment with life as it is, because we’re not in opposition.

Responsibility with Joy

• One version of taking the one seat is to take total responsibility for your life.
• What you do has consequences for yourself and for others. Your life counts! You have more
effect than you know.
• Take responsibility with joy, not with fear and terror. What could be better than to express
your deepest being in words and actions?

The Grace of Revelation

• An analogy for deep revelation would be as if one was instantly given the ability to play any
musical instrument, without trying, for a given amount of time. The truth of one’s being comes
as a gift. But then one day the gift seems to disappear and you wonder how to get it back. It’s
confusing because it feels like you are no longer in the fullness of revelation.
• You can’t just sit around and wait for grace again, and yet the grace wasn’t a result of what you
did. You find yourself in a paradox:
1. You can’t produce enlightenment.
2. What you’re searching for is what you are.
• If your mode of being is purified and in alignment with life, awakening can take a deep
hold without the ego claiming things for itself.

Enlightened Relativity
• Anyone can wake up at any moment, but in order to live the awakening, your humanity will
have to align with existence. This alignment happens through manifesting your soul values.
• You can become aligned with the enlightenment experience even without great revelation.
Grand experiences are not necessary to embody your important values.
• When we come into alignment, there is less internal and external conflict in our lives. There is

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 seeing the unity of existence. The more you come into that alignment, the more beautiful
your experiences become. It is sacred and timeless.
• Enlightened relativity allows for the experience of a unified whole. Your experience has a sense
of eternity and freedom.

The Discovery of Meaning

• When you’re aligned with life, life has a great feeling of meaning and significance. It is filled
with awe and wonder, as opposed to a philosophic experience of meaning.
• Enlightenment doesn’t mean that your life is free of challenges. But enlightenment allows one to
meet these challenges from an unconflicted state of being.
• The complete, transcendent, radical, empty state of being is devoid of meaning because it isn’t
relevant in the absolute.
• In Zen, enlightenment is the harmonization of the absolute and the relative in mind, body, and
spirit; it’s when the two domains of being are no longer seen as different.
• Enlightened relativity is where everything is seen to be the face of God, or where one sees the
Self as everything.
• From the absolute point of view, life is just a dream.
• In enlightened relativity, one sees the truth of both the absolute and the relative. There is
meaning and there is no meaning simultaneously.

The Unique Experience of Spiritual Autonomy

• You experience autonomy or an individualized expression of being when you are not defined by
conditioning. This autonomy is usually hard won over time.
• Perfection is not called for and actually causes a loss of balance. Imperfection, however, does not
excuse bad behavior.
• When we don’t expect perfection, it is easier to embody our true soul values because we’re not
hung up with the inner critic.
• Soul values give your life orientation. They will also challenge you to exercise your deeper values
in your relationships and your work.
• Some situations require a “no” which is really an affirmation of something positive.
• This journey to spiritual autonomy is a process of discovery. It is not an idealized view of
enlightenment that will only cause suffering.
• We don’t really know what enlightenment looks like. There are endless ways that authentic,
spiritual, autonomous lives will look.
• When you are not looking for a particular endpoint, you can just be in the here and now.

Caller #1: Embodying Deep Aloneness

• Deep aloneness is experiencing the All as one, and also experiencing a profound aloneness.

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 • When people first come into the aloneness, there can be some resistance.
• We try to fill up the aloneness because it can be intimidating or it doesn’t feel life affirming, but
it is a dimension of being. If you let yourself go into it, it won’t be what you imagine.
• When you embody your deep aloneness all the way, it becomes a wellspring of well-being.
But you have to really let yourself go there and open to what it really is.
• Experience the depth of aloneness. That is where your spiritual autonomy comes from.
• If you examine your soul values, you will see that any one includes the others. Choose the one
that is most relevant to you now. It can change, but you need to take a deep plunge into one.
• If your soul value gets corrupted by the ego, recognize it and let the experience help orient you
to what is in more alignment with being. Self-judgment will just keep you in the spin.

Caller #2: Exploring Self-Doubt

• Letting go of the inner judge requires a trust in yourself.
• “I could be wrong” can be useful spiritually. One day it might also be possible to say, “I could
be right,” which is just as important.
• People with great integrity are often afraid of letting doubt go because they fear that they
will fall into delusion. Their self-criticism becomes a manifestation of their integrity, but
they can’t rely on self-criticism forever.
• Trust your inherent integrity. At first it can be a leap of faith, but you don’t have to doubt all the
time.
• The last thing that doubt doubts is doubt itself.
• Each of us longs to discover our own resource for truthfulness, where we no longer rely on
confirmation from outside sources.
• Take the risk of releasing self-doubt and trust that your inner truth will right you.

Caller #3: Causeless Joy in Action

• All views may be ultimately empty, but some views are relatively more valuable or wise than
others.
• Something in you knows innately what is wiser or of more value. This kind of discrimination
makes more sense than undercutting your innate knowing.
• What if you navigated your world from an experience of causeless joy?
• Joy can be a soul value as long as it’s for everybody, not just for yourself. What would it be to
embody joy in action?
• All soul values embody being in action. Such embodiment allows the divisiveness of inner and
outer to disappear.
• Allow yourself to literally embody joy in your physical movements and in your words.
• Causeless joy is one of the greatest mysteries of experience.
• All soul values causelessly emerge in us.

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• The actual experience of being is causeless and innate.
• Take your experience of being and literally embody it in your worldly actions. Something in
your core of being naturally inclines this way.
• Our soul values are redemptive presences; to redeem is to return something to its natural state of
wholeness.
• We can redeem the little moments of our lives by taking responsibility for our actions and our
words.
• We can redeem the little judgments in our minds.
• We bring a little more redemptive presence to the world—because we can.

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