A Revolution of Being 2019 – Session 8 Notes

April 24, 2019

These Session Notes are a summary of topics and points Adyashanti addressed during this session. They are
not necessarily exact quotes or a transcription. They may also include writings Adya created for this session.
We hope these notes are helpful to you as a reference tool. If you have not already, we encourage you to watch
or listen to the actual broadcast for the direct transmission of his teaching.

Guided Meditation: The Background of Silent Awareness

• Allow yourself to arrive in your body. Transition into a direct experience of being. Just
resting attention with the senses of hearing, the feel of the moment, and the feel of the
body. Inviting the body to relax into the moment, letting the mind become receptive into
a state of listening—a deep inner attentiveness.

• Notice the background of whatever you feel in your experience. Notice that silent
and quiet background—the background of our consciousness, our own psyche, that
is the quiet and naturally aware foundation of consciousness. Let yourself intuitively
sense into the background.

• As we rest into this background in an easeful way, we see each moment of experience is a
momentary experience happening against this background of quiet awareness.

• When experiences pass, it allows you to touch upon your truer being, which isn’t an
image or idea. It’s not the conditioned movements of ego. It’s something more
fundamental. It’s the ground in which all experiences arise and pass.

• This is a slight shift of attention from whatever is occurring in the foreground of

experience to the background, a quiet and aware background—like space.

• That which seems like nothing can show itself to be quite extraordinary, a doorway into
the sacred. It all begins with a simple reorientation of attention, and a heartful
willingness—with all your senses—to listen, to sense your depth. And a willingness to
explore being that depth, versus a compulsive need to describe or understand it.

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Committing Time and Attention to Your Depth
• It’s important to take time to be quiet each day, dedicating time to turning attention to the
quiet dimension of being—that expanse of aware emptiness that’s the continuum against
which our desires, dreams, and hopes arise.

• We are so used to our mind asserting itself or grasping at its understanding. There are so
many ways in which our relative being is always on the move. Yet our spirit seeks its
depth, its home ground. If we don’t give that dimension attention, we feel estranged and
disconnected from our own ground.

• We have two fundamental currencies—our time and attention. They show us what
we value in life. Giving time and attention to your depth is quite essential.

• Committing attentiveness to your own ground is a fundamental aspect of spirituality.

Otherwise teachings are dropping into our conditioned mind, and they become less
transformative.

• A moment of clarity can come at any time. That’s a truth. But it’s also a truth that things
we give time and attention to will grow.

• The degree of your commitment in this retreat is in large measure in relation to how you
showed up.

• This online retreat will come to an end, but that doesn’t have to mean the end of your
commitment.
Reflections on a Nisargadatta Maharaj Teaching
• Quote from Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“When the I am myself goes, the I am all comes. When the I am all goes, I am comes.
When the I am goes, Reality alone is, and in it every I am is preserved and glorified.
Diversity without distinction is the ultimate the mind can touch.”

• Spirituality suggests a deeper orientation than I am myself. However, how we define I

am myself is really a phenomenon of our mind. The I am myself keeps us in the limited
domain.

• The combination of inquiry and meditation means going to our direct immediate sense of
being, not to who we think we are. It’s an I am that is deeper than I am myself.

• When we come out of the confines of I am myself, we come to I am—the sense of our
being becomes universal. That doesn’t mean you lose your sense as a particular human

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 being. That’s a misunderstanding. It’s coming into a truer sense of being. Our sense of
being is everywhere, quite universal—even if there’s a local sense of being. This local
sense is somewhat necessary for functioning.

• When the I am all goes, I am comes. When the I am goes, reality alone is. This is the
ground of being. We step out of all identifications, of all descriptions of I am. And in it
every I am is preserved and glorified.

• There’s a certain sense of distinctiveness, not separation. It’s a certain human life stream,
not as an ego. It’s more like an egoless ego—ego as function, not as identity.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

• This isn’t about exclusively going to the divine ground of being and having a deep
realization of the ground of being, even though this is essential. But what begins to occur
is the dialectic of enlightenment—the movement towards the depth and the surface, both
the revelation and everyday life.

• Many people in spirituality have questions about how to live the depth of being. What
does it mean to live that? There is a dialectic relationship between depth and surface.
The function of soul is what’s communicating; it’s what is interpreting our depth into
relative terms. Otherwise spirituality becomes narcissistic.

• A true depth of experience is how profoundly meaningful experiences of being find a

relative expression in all of our normal ordinary encounters every day. It’s coming to the
depths and bringing back the jewel of realization to the relative world. This innate
instinct is to live from a certain depth so that the most meaningful experience informs
how we engage in life.
The Devoted Heart of Self-Giving
• The practice of self-giving seems to have touched a lot of people in this retreat. One
reason for this is because one of the great challenges we have in modern life—where we
have endless distractions—is that we can forget what it is to live and relate from the
heart.

• Sometimes we approach meditation like mastering a meditative technique. There’s

something more powerful if we don’t function in a technical way.

• Self-giving is an attitude. It’s heartful. There’s a difference between letting go and

offering of yourself—offering your attention as an offering. There is no way to do
that but from the heart.

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 • Self-giving is a giving of attention to the moment. It’s an offering rather than trying to be
in the moment. Giving time and attention is a devotional act.

• There is a heartful engagement in the process of letting go.

• You can give attention to unlimited things. We’re choosing all the time what we’re
giving attention to, which dictates our experience. Notice what you give your attention to
and how you give attention.

• Give attention as a heartful offering like when you have a friend and they need you to
listen. Attention is healing. You’re not technically listening, you’re heartfully engaged.
That’s the quality of self-giving.

• In the West, it’s our hearts that need to come online—the spiritual heart. It’s a sense of
offering, devotion, or love. Those are bigger expressions than any particular emotion.
That way of giving our attention is as an act of devotion, maybe even worship to the
ground of our being. It’s a different way to approach spiritual practice.

• Some people express devotion by singing bhajans to God. Those of course are heartful
and meant to evoke the deeper dimension of heart. But in almost every moment of the
day, you’re deciding what to give attention to—in a technical way or devotedly. What
you are giving your attention to tells you what is important.

• To give your attention devotedly requires more of you. More of you has to be engaged.
Perhaps it’s the next person you talk to, or doing the dishes.

• Spirituality is another way of saying living a conscious life. Spirituality is a way that we
are orienting, not just a little private segment of our lives.

• Spirituality is the quality with which we show up—how we are giving attention.
Spirituality then breaks out of spiritual boxes. There aren’t spiritual and unspiritual
moments. There’s just life.
Knowing through Being
• So much of the spiritual orientation is knowing through being. We often approach
knowing through collecting information. That’s one kind of knowing, which is fine. It’s
an abstract type of knowing—knowing of information and ideas. There’s a different way
of knowing—knowing something through being it.

• We know awakening by being awake. We know God by being God. We know

consciousness by being consciousness. We come to know what it means to be free by

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 being free. We come to know what eternity is by being eternity.

• If we understand that distinction, it’s a transformation of being that the spiritual endeavor
is about. Otherwise, it’s a theology or philosophy.

• This knowing of being is tied to self-giving. You come to know something by giving
yourself to it. You come to know it by devotedly offering all your attention until you
disappear in the offering. And, in some moment, you are the ground.

• And the ground of being gives itself to your relative existence in return. This is the
dialectic of enlightenment. The soul is the mediator that dives deep into the ground and
comes back to the surface. It brings the ground of being up to the surface. This is the
cyclic giving and receiving.

Immersing into and Emerging from the Divine Ground

• It’s useful that we have an understanding of what we are orienting towards and why we
are orienting towards it.

• If we take it all the way, when we have an experience of the divine ground of being,
there’s a complete immersion in the divine ground. We lose ourselves for a while.
Everything disappears. We’ve moved beyond the senses.

• A lot of the Heart Sutra is describing this experience of divine ground—no body, no I, no
feeling, no hearing, no sound, no consciousness. It’s negating sensory experience. We go
beyond the senses.

• When you’re in a total immersion of the divine ground, there’s still consciousness
but everything disappears. To lose sensory contact with the external and internal
world is not the goal of spirituality. But when we go to the divine ground completely,
and then come back to the senses, we see what happens. Bit by bit, it’s as if the
world starts to reassemble itself.

• Going to the divine ground is like rebooting a computer. In turning the program off,
there’s just awareness. Then the whole system starts to reboot. Your entire experience
reemerges and comes back online. It’s not going to be the same as before taking the
immersion. Experiencing how this happens is revelatory.

• Buddha used the metaphor of a ridge pole that holds up a big tent and the ego as house
builder. The ridge pole got pulled out—not just sense of self but the whole world. The
whole thing comes down. After seeing the whole experience collapse, Buddha watched

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 how experience is put back together piece by piece by piece.

• Another image Buddha used to reflect nirvana, which means cessation, is the image of
blowing out of a candle. This was going deeper than all the senses. All programs go
offline—no self, no sense of body.

• Potentially disappearing often elicits fear. Our intuitive body gets nervous, not that
there’s anything to be afraid of. Nothing is destroyed. We temporarily go offline as we
touch the foundation of our psyche. Then we watch it come back online and your
experience is going to be different.

• It also does away with the fear of dying, as we’ve gone through a psychological death.
Yet something survives.

• That divine ground of being that we go through in a deep immersion is indescribable.

There’s no spatial quality such as big or small. This tends to remove a lot of fear,
identification, grasping at conditioning, rigid positionality, and attachment.

• Dipping in the absolute is the ultimate spiritual purification. But we’re not going to
be immersed in the absolute all the time. We can get to a point of having one foot in
the absolute and one in the relative, where we are being informed simultaneously by
both. As this matures, the unspeakable ground and relative day-to-day humanness
are there together, and it is seen that they are actually the same thing. The deeper
the experience that we have of the divine ground, the more we can function from
both at the same time.

• The insight of Mahayana Buddhism is that nirvana and samsara are one; this is meant as
an experiential statement. At a certain maturity of realization, one can see the sameness
even though in description they sound infinitely apart.

• Immersion in the divine ground requires a release in self-consciousness.

• You dwell in the divine ground when you’re in deep sleep, but you are there in an
unconscious way. This has a regenerative effect on us, but we don’t tend to get the
liberating effects. What brings the transformation is when the divine ground
becomes conscious. It changes the basic operating system. It differs in people how
much is transformed.

The Immediate Sense of Being

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 • Adya shies away from making statements about the ultimate nature. The only experience
you have are subjective experiences. There’s no such thing as an objective experience.

• Making speculative interpretations about the nature of reality is unnecessary. They

don’t bring about the end of suffering. They can be fascinating, but what spirituality
is all about is the direct immediate experience of being.

• Any way we touch upon the ground of being can be transformative and liberating to an
amazing degree.

• The orientations in the guided meditations are simple and immediate: silence, stillness,
abiding as awareness. In doing the meditations with the attitude of self-giving, you give
the giver; you give the experience of you giving yourself.

• One of Adya’s interpretations of the divine ground is the knowing unknown. In one sense
it’s unknown, but it’s not unknown like not knowing a fact. It’s an existential unknown—
being the unknown.

• The divine ground is an unknowability. It is that which knows. Its nature is awareness,
and awareness is a kind of knowing. To open your eyes and see what’s around you is a
kind of nonconceptual knowing. To hear the wind in the trees is a nonconceptual
knowing. Awareness itself is a nonconceptual knowing.
Three Dimensions of Spiritual Awakening
• There are three dimensions where spiritual awakening can occur in the body. The gut is
one access point for the pure potentiality of the divine ground. The divine ground can
only be accessed in an intuitive way.

• The heart is where we can know unity. It’s being intimate and connected. It’s a loving
unity, not the fact of unity. There’s a birth of a different kind of love referred to as agape
or compassion. It’s innate and universal; a love that pours out for existence itself. It’s
where innate compassion overflows.

• In the head, you can sense the space around thought. Here true nature is wide open and
vast. much like space. In the gut dimension of awakening, there’s no spatial quality.

• People often experience these three different domains of awakening going from head to
heart to gut. But not always. For Adya it was opposite. Sometimes they all happen at the
same time. But just because the divine ground in the gut is awake doesn’t mean the heart
is awake.

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 • Our body is a representation of our psyche. Adya uses psyche in an expansive way. It’s
indescribable; it has no boundaries. The experience is the total unity of being.

• The spiritual instinct thrives by living on the edge of discovery—not grasping for
something, but living on the edge of awakening. The most awake people Adya knows
live on the edge, and it becomes a way of being.

• Being is always and already complete, and it has an infinite capacity to reveal itself—an
ongoing enlightenment.

Caller #1: Sharing from Direct Experience

• There’s a time where we are seekers. But this does get played out at some point. See the
spiritual instinct without running it through the seeking programming.

• Stay connected to the vitality of the instinct, but don’t be too light or too loose. That
instinct lives on the edge of discovery without striving. It’s a process of self-revelation.

• There’s the human desire of the heart that would love to embody and live from our most
meaningful experience of being. That’s endless.

• No one is a perfect expression of divine ground.

• Adya’s teacher always said to teach from one’s own experience. This way one won’t
get inflated. We can think our own experience is an exclusive claim of reality. It’s
good to have a healthy respect for the infinite ways that we can become lost in our
grandeur. It’s easy to fall into the “know-it-all.”

• When we think we are speaking from our own experience, are we really? We are often
talking from ideas.

• When two people are truly speaking from their own experience, then a greater truth
shows up. It’s heartful. It’s walking our talk.

• When we are being at our deepest, we are being at our best. It seems good for all of us.

• In sharing the dharma, Adya’s primary job is to be his own best student.

Caller #2: Not Resisting Suffering

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 • The more we try to avoid suffering, the more we tend to endure it.

• By no longer feeling compelled to avoid suffering, the resistance to suffering falls away;
it doesn’t seem to be a relevant orientation.

• The feeling of separation dissolving is like a sugar cube dissolving in a cup of tea. It’s the
combination of transcending the separate self and the separate self dissolving as we
reorient to something more quiet.

• Wherever we are on the path is just right. Whatever the current state of becoming more
conscious is perfect. When we are in alignment with where we are, our own revelation is
sufficient.
Ongoing Commitment after Retreat Ends
• One of the most important parts of the retreat is the commitment. Again, just
because this particular structure ends, it doesn’t mean that the commitment goes
away. It’s committing to that which is most meaningful to us, to the truth of our
being, to a flourishing life.

• Adya hopes you keep with that deep commitment without grasping. Living on the edge of
discovery is a beautiful way to live.

• Adya recommends revisiting anything that grabbed you in this retreat. Go back to the
guided meditations and practices, as they can come alive in a whole other way.

• He shares his gratitude for being with him, for putting yourself out there, for the emails,
and for all the ways you participated. He hopes this becomes a foundation to practice.