Adyashanti Quotes

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretence. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

The truth is that you already are what you are seeking.

All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.

My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.

The Truth is the only thing you’ll ever run into that has no agenda.

Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.

Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. End of story.

We realize--often quite suddenly--that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center.

Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?

If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind's clothing with more sooty knowledge. No, I have something else in mind. Today I hold a flame in my left hand and a sword in my right. There will be no damage control today. For God is in a mood to plunder your riches and fling you nakedly into such breathtaking poverty that all that will be left of you will be a tendency to shine. So don't just sit around this flame choking on your mind. For this is no campfire song to mindlessly mantra yourself to sleep with. Jump now into the space between thoughts and exit this dream before I burn the damn place down.

As I often tell my students, the person you’ll have the hardest time opening to and truly loving without reserve is yourself. Once you can do that, you can love the whole universe unconditionally.

In the end it’s all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don’t.

When someone tells you, “I love you,” and then you feel, “Oh, I must be worthy after all,” that’s an illusion. That’s not true. Or someone says, “I hate you,” and you think, “Oh, God, I knew it; I’m not very worthy,” that’s not true either. Neither one of these thoughts hold any intrinsic reality. They are an overlay. When someone says, “I love you,” he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, “I hate you,” she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views—literally

As long as you are trying to become, trying to get somewhere, trying to attain something, you are quite literally moving away from the Truth itself.

Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.

Because of an innocent misunderstanding you think that you are a human being in the relative world seeking the experience of oneness, but actually you are the One expressing itself as the experience of being a human being.

When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer.

Time to cash in your chips put your ideas and beliefs on the table. See who has the bigger hand you or the Mystery that pervades you. Time to scrape the mind's shit off your shoes undo the laces that hold your prison together and dangle your toes into emptiness. Once you've put everything on the table once all of your currency is gone and your pockets are full of air all you've got left to gamble with is yourself. Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top of the highest stakes table. Place yourself as the bet. Look God in the eyes and finally for once in your life lose.

Awareness isn’t something we own; awareness isn’t something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.

At first it seems as if begoing follows becoming. But look even closer and you will see that there are only flashes of lightning illuminating the empty sky.

Do not think that enlightenment is going to make you special, it’s not. If you feel special in any way, then enlightenment has not occurred. I meet a lot of people who think they are enlightened and awake simply because they have had a very moving spiritual experience. They wear their enlightenment on their sleeve like a badge of honor. They sit among friends and talk about how awake they are while sipping coffee at a cafe. The funny thing about enlightenment is that when it is authentic, there is no one to claim it. Enlightenment is very ordinary; it is nothing special. Rather than making you more special, it is going to make you less special. It plants you right in the center of a wonderful humility and innocence. Everyone else may or may not call you enlightened, but when you are enlightened the whole notion of enlightenment and someone who is enlightened is a big joke. I use the word enlightenment all the time; not to point you toward it but to point you beyond it. Do not get stuck in enlightenment.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

If you think that people should be nice to one another, then by all means be nice. But when you project that belief onto the people and the world around you as if it were an objective reality, or worse still, as if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.

Whatever the image of yourself, it’s a mask and it’s hiding emptiness.

The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that insecurity, and all wisdom will be yours.

When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.

The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free—everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.

As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” [Gospel of Thomas 70]

Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.

The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world.

Whatever you think you are, that’s not it.

The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline; concentration is a way in which we are actually directing or guiding or controlling our experience. Meditation is letting go of control, letting go of guiding our experience in any way whatsoever. The foundation of True Meditation is that we are letting go of control.

When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.

You are an incredible mystery that you will never figure out. To be this mystery consciously is the greatest joy.

Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. THOMAS MERTON

Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret

There is an invitation beyond the wall of knowledge, which is not to some regressive state before the mind can operate, but a transcendent state that’s beyond where the mind can go. That’s what spirituality is. It’s going where the mind cannot go.

Live by truth or suffer. It’s that simple.

Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.

The aim of my teaching is enlightenment, awakening from the dream state of separateness into the reality of the One. In short, my teaching is focused on realizing what you are.

When you argue with reality, reality always wins

Everything you blame, you’re stuck with. Bless it. Wish it well. Wish it its own freedom, and it will be very powerful in the way that it will not come back to you. If you don’t forgive it, if you don’t bless it, if you don’t wish it well, the energy will just be magnetically drawn back to you because it’s looking for resolution. All negative energy that we’ve inherited, it’s there because it’s looking for resolution. —Adyashanti

One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment comes from a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello, who passed away some years ago. Someone asked him to define his experience of enlightenment. He said, “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” I love that, because it defines enlightenment not just as a realization, but as an activity. Enlightenment is when everything within us is in cooperation with the flow of life itself, with the inevitable.

Enlightenment is the natural state of consciousness, the innocent state of consciousness, that state which is uncontaminated by the movement of thought, uncontaminated by control or manipulation of mind.

We can only start to allow consciousness to wake up from its identification with thought and feeling, with body and mind and personality, by allowing ourselves to rest in the natural state from the very beginning.

If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.

To be intimate is to feel the silence, the space that everything is happening in.

The more in harmony you are with the flow of your own existence, the more magical life becomes.

Ego is nothing more than the beliefs, ideas, and images we have about ourselves—and so it is actually

It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.

The first stage of the awakening journey is the calling. The calling arrives when we first feel that spiritual impulse that galvanizes our attention. All of a sudden we sense a greater mystery to life that we seek to experience more deeply; it literally calls us.

Beyond even any teaching, though, the aspect of spiritual life that is the most profound is the element of grace. Grace is something that comes to us when we somehow find ourselves completely available, when we become openhearted and open-minded, and are willing to entertain the possibility that we may not know what we think we know. In this gap of not knowing, in the suspension of any conclusion, a whole other element of life and reality can rush in. This is what I call grace. It’s that moment of “ah-ha!”—a moment of recognition when we realize something that previously we never could quite imagine.

Effortless doesn’t mean no effort; effortless means just enough effort to be vivid, to be present, to be here, to be now. To be bright. My teacher used to call this “effortless effort.” We each need to find out for ourselves what this means. Too much effort and we get too tight; too little effort and we get dreamy. Somewhere in the middle is a state of vividness and clarity and inner brightness.

Now is just what's happening – minus everything you think.

If you strip it of all the complex terminology and all the complex jargon, enlightenment is simply returning to our natural state of being. A natural state, of course, means a state which is not contrived, a state that requires no effort or discipline to maintain, a state of being which is not enhanced by any sort of manipulation of mind or body—in other words, a state that is completely natural, completely spontaneous.

The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond—awake and present, here and now already.

Those who are free don’t want anything. They don’t want anything from their mind, they don’t want anything from their emotions, they don’t want anything from anyone, and they don’t want anything from life. They don’t want anything. If you don’t want, all that’s left is an incredible sense of being free.

When our minds start to open, we’re no longer in a constant state of evaluation and judgment. Naturally, then, our senses open—and we can really see what is before us. Our eyes open in a different way, our hearing opens in a different way, our emotions open, our hearts open to all of existence. We see how judging and condemning actually close our hearts and harden us to our experience of life and others.

When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what's left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are

In truth, we are life itself. When we see and perceive that we are the totality of life, we are no longer afraid of it; we no longer feel afraid of birth, life, and death. But until we see that, we will see life as intimidating, as a barrier we somehow have to get through.

Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don’t go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are.

This one question -- "What do I know for certain?"-- is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it's meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-- things you believe because you were taught or told that they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.

In the original Greek, one of the meanings of sin [hamartia] is simply “to miss the mark.

The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.

The changeless is what knows the change, the changeless is unconditioned

Jesus is saying, “Come, come into the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven exists on the face of the earth, and men and women do not understand it.

I have found over the years of working with people, even those who have had very deep and profound awakenings, that most people have a fear of being truthful, of really being honest-- not only with others, but with themselves as well. Of course, the core of this fear is that most people know intuitively that if they were actually truthful and totally sincere and honest, they would no longer be able to control anybody.

Of course, there are those churches today that are inspired by the real living presence of Christ, but as a whole, Christianity needs new life breathed into it. It needs to be challenged to awaken from the old structures that confine spirit, so that the perennial spirit of awakening can flourish once again.

By identifying with a particular name that belongs to a particular body and mind, the self begins the process of creating a separate identity. Add in a complex jumble of ideas, beliefs, and opinions, along with some selective and often painful memories with which to create a past to identify with, as well as the raw emotional energy to hold it all together, and before you know it, you've got a very convincing - though divided - self.

You come into the natural state by letting go of control by letting go of effort and resting in a state of vividness. It’s very simple. It couldn’t be simpler. Sit down; let everything be as it already is.

the notion that we are separate is not really true; it’s all made up. It’s all conjured up in our mind. It’s one big dream that we have. The difficulty with this dream is that almost everybody around us is having the same dream. It’s essentially the collective dream of humanity. So it’s not just you or me that’s dreaming; almost all human beings are also having this dream of being separate, of being completely other than the world around them. What this means is that we really have to look within ourselves quite deeply, because we’re not only looking beyond our own deluded mind, our own misunderstanding; we’re looking beyond the delusion of the entirety of humanity.

There’s only one guarantee that Jesus gave: if you can receive and awaken and embody what he is speaking about, then your life will never be the same again. Then you will realize that you’re already living in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Our minds may believe that we need subtle and complex spiritual teachings to guide us to Reality, but we do not. In fact, the more complex the teaching is, the easier it is for the mind to hide from itself amidst the complexity while imagining that it is advancing toward enlightenment. But it is often only advancing in creating more and more intricate circles to walk around and around in.

Through the whole trajectory from birth to childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, we change so much, not only physically but also emotionally and intellectually, yet something remains unchanged. That sense of something unchanged is the eternal spark within. At the beginning it may be felt as a very subtle, almost incomprehensible intuition, but when we bring our full attention to that felt intuition of what’s the same throughout our whole lives, then that little seed of divine radiance can begin to reveal itself, can begin to shine brighter and brighter in our lives.

Meditation is neither a means to an end nor something to perfect. Meditation done correctly is an expression of Reality, not a path to it. Meditation done incorrectly is a perfect mirror of how you are resisting the present moment, judging it, or attaching to it.

There is a very simple secret to being happy. Just let go of your demand on this moment. Any time you have a demand on the moment to give you something or remove something, there is suffering. Your demands keep you chained to the dream state of conditioned mind. The problem is that when there is a demand, you completely miss what is now. Letting go applies to the highest sacred demand, and even to the demand for love. If you demand in some subtle way to be loved, even if you get love, it is never enough. In the next moment, the demand reasserts itself, and you need to be loved again. But as soon as you let go, there is knowing in that instant that there is love here already. The mind is afraid to let go of its demand because the mind thinks that if it lets go, it is not going to get what it wants - as if demanding works. This is not the way things work. Stop chasing peace and stop chasing love, and your heart becomes full. Stop trying to be a better person, and you are a better person. Stop trying to forgive, and forgiveness happens. Stop and be still.

Awakeness is not moving back from, trying to explain, trying to fix, or get rid of. Awakeness, when it’s allowed to be experienced, is a deep love and caring for what is. Love is always throwing itself into the moment, here and now, fully abandoning itself into now. To be in relationship in this way is simple. It is humble. It is very intimate. Then you can meet another person in a whole different way.

Abiding means letting everything be as it already is – no matter what it is. If you're feeling good, let that be as it is. If you're feeling bad, let that be as it is. No matter what your emotional, physical, or mental state, let it be as it is and don't wish it to be otherwise. If you want it to be different from what it is, you're not abiding; you're picking and choosing and trying to control your experience. (p. 29)

The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience.

Absolute Truth is not a belief, not a religion, not a philosophy, not a momentary experience, and not a transient spiritual experience either. It is neither static nor in motion, neither good nor bad. It is other than all of that, more other than you can ever imagine. Truth cannot be touched by thought or imagined by the mind. It can only be found in the heart of universal being. To know thy self is the key. To bring forth your being is The Way.

when Legion says, “for we are many,” what are the many? Our modern interpretation would be that Legion has a completely fractured psyche. When the psyche fractures, it’s like a pane of glass dropped on the ground; it shatters into many bits and pieces. Someone to whom this has happened is literally lost in the unconscious; that becomes their reality.

It’s important that meditation is not seen as something that only happens when you are seated in a quiet place. Otherwise spirituality and our daily life become two separate things. That’s the primary illusion—that there is something called “my spiritual life,” and something called “my daily life.” When we wake up to reality, we find they are all one thing. It’s all one seamless expression of spirit.

In a certain sense, enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness. We start to realize the ordinary is extraordinary. It’s almost like catching onto a hidden secret—that all along we were in the promised land, all along we were in the kingdom of heaven. From the very beginning, there was only nirvana, as the Buddha would say. But we were misperceiving things. By believing the images in the mind, by contracting through fear, hesitation, and doubt, we misperceived where we were. We didn’t realize we were in heaven; we didn’t realize we were in the promised land. We didn’t realize that nirvana is right here, right now, exactly where we are.

Imagine if you took it on in yourself to reorient your life trajectory toward your divinity. Your divinity: I so loved the world, that I gave it all of myself. Imagine your birth as an act of pouring yourself forth into life as a loving means of redemption. Imagine your human life as what you have come to redeem. And when you’ve fully awakened to all of it, then you’ve fully redeemed your human incarnation.

All thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts—occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you’ll see that a thought simply occurs on its own—it arises without any intention on your part. In response to this, we’re taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can, just for a moment, relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound: that thoughts arise and play out, spontaneously and on their own, within a vast space; the noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet.

TO BE EVERYTHING AND NOTHING AT THE SAME TIME Is it possible to start to feel, in this very moment, that our bodies, our minds, and even our personalities are ways through which our spiritual essence connects with the world around us? That these bodies and minds are actually sensing organs for spirit? Our physical forms are the vehicle through which spiritual essence gets to experience its own mysterious creation—to be bewildered by its creation, shocked by it, in awe of it, and even confused by it. Spirit is pure potential that contains every possible outcome. From the standpoint of our spiritual essence, nothing is to be avoided. No experiences need to be turned from. Everything, in its way, is a gift—even the painful things. In reality, all of life—every moment, every experience—is an expression of spirit.

We are so busy and obsessed with our restless thinking about everything and everyone that we have mistaken our thinking about everything and everyone for everything and everyone. This tendency to take our thoughts to be real is what keeps the dream state intact and keeps us trapped within its domain of unconsciousness and strife. To many people the very idea that what is is more real than all of their beliefs and opinions about what is is hard to believe. But that’s how it is when you are caught up in a dream.

The waves of mind demand so much of Silence. But She does not talk back does not give answers nor arguments. She is the hidden author of every thought every feeling every moment. Silence. She speaks only one word. And that word is this very existence. No name you give Her touches Her captures Her. No understanding can embrace Her. Mind throws itself at Silence demanding to be let in. But no mind can enter into Her radiant darkness Her pure and smiling nothingness. The mind hurls itself into sacred questions. But Silence remains unmoved by the tantrums. She asks only for nothing. Nothing. But you won’t give it to Her because it is the last coin in your pocket. And you would rather give her your demands than your sacred and empty hands. *** Everything leaps out in celebration of mystery, but only nothing enters the sacred source, the silent substance. Only nothing gets touched and becomes sacred, realizes its own divinity, realizes what it is without the aid of a single thought. Silence is my secret. Not hidden. Not hidden. —ADYASHANTI

A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it. Belief leads to various forms of fundamentalism and shuts down the curiosity and inquiry that are essential to open the way for awakening and what lies beyond awakening. A good spiritual teaching is something that you work with and apply. In doing so, it works on you (often in a hidden way) and helps reveal to you the Truth (and falseness) that lies within you.

Essentially, we fall into grace. By that I mean that a certain mysterious quality reveals itself and cradles us within an intimacy with all of existence. This is something that many people are looking for without even knowing it. Almost everybody is looking for intimacy—a closeness, a sense of union with their own existence or with God, or whatever their concept of higher reality is. All this yearning actually comes from our longing for closeness, intimacy, and true union. When we open to life in this way, we begin to find an inner stability simply because we’re no longer at odds with our experience.

One of the most important steps in the process of coming to the end of suffering is seeing that there’s something deep inside of us that actually wants to suffer, that actually indulges in suffering. As I’ve mentioned, there is a piece of us that wants to suffer because it is through suffering that we maintain this wall of separation around us. It is through our suffering that we can continue to hold onto everything we think is true. Wearing the veil of suffering, we don’t really have to look at ourselves and say, “I’m the one that’s dreaming. I’m the one that’s full of illusions. I’m the one that’s holding on with everything I have.” It’s much easier to see that the other person is caught in illusion. That’s easy. “So and so over there, they’re completely lost in illusion. They don’t know the truth.” It’s a whole other thing to say, “No, no, no! I’m the one who is caught in illusion. I don’t know what’s real, I don’t know what’s true, and part of me actually wants to suffer because then I can remain separate and distinct.

As a spiritual teacher, I’ve met a lot of people who have meditated for many, many years. One of the most common things I hear from many of these people is that, despite having meditated for all this time, they feel essentially untransformed. The deep inner transformation—the spiritual revelation—that meditation offers is something that eludes a lot of people, even those who are longtime practitioners. There are actually good and specific reasons why some meditation practices, including the kind of meditation that I was once engaged in, do not lead to this promised state of transformation. The main reason is actually extraordinarily simple and therefore easy to miss: we approach meditation with the wrong attitude. We carry out our meditation with an attitude of control and manipulation, and that is the very reason our meditation leads us to what feels like a dead end. The awakened state of being, the enlightened state of being, can also be called the natural state of being. How can control and manipulation possibly lead us to our natural state?

It is much like when you have a dream at night and are identified with some character and think you are different from all the others. When you wake up from your dream in the morning, you realize that you are not the character in the dream. You are the dreamer. Everything in the dream came from you. This is a metaphor for spiritual awakening, because when you wake up spiritually, you realize you are not the body-mind. But what is usually missed is that you are the ultimate source of the entire dream. I think this is pretty easy to understand. In one sense, you see that you are not anyone, but in the other, you realize that you are the source of all.

When we are in the dream state, we do not know what we are doing. We are simply acting out of deep programming. But once we have seen the true nature of things-- once Spirit has opened its eyes within us-- we suddenly know what we're doing. There's a much more accurate sense of whether we're moving or speaking or even thinking from truth or not. When we act from a place of untruth anyway, in spite of our knowing, it's much more painful than we we didn't know our actions were untrue. When we say something to someone that we know is untrue, it causes an inner division that is vastly more painful than when we said the same thing and thought it was true.

I remember hearing a talk from a very famous Tibetan teacher, a man who had spent many years in a small, stone hut in the Himalayas. He was crippled, and so he couldn’t use either one of his legs. He told a story of how a big boulder fell on his legs and broke them, and he spent many years in a stone hut, because there was really nothing that he could do. It was hard for someone with broken legs to get around much in the Himalayas. He told the story of being in this small hut, and he said, “To be locked in that small hut for so many years was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was a great grace, because if it wasn’t for that, I would never have turned within, and I would never have found the freedom that revealed itself there. So I look back at the losing of my legs as one of the most profound and lucky events of my whole life.” Normally, most of us wouldn’t think that losing the use of our legs would be grace. We have certain ideas about how we want grace to appear. But grace is simply that which opens our hearts, that which has the capacity to come in and open our perceptions about life.

If we’re willing to look in a deep way underneath the appearances, what we expect to discover—or perhaps hope to discover—is some great, shining image. Most people, deep in their unconscious, want to find an idea of themselves, an image of themselves, that’s really good, quite wonderful, quite worthy of admiration and approval. Yet, when we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea of yourself, and you don’t insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it’s just an image, it’s just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Because this is so unexpected, most people will move away from it almost instinctively. They’ll move right back into a more positive image. But if we really want to know who we are, if we want to get to the bottom of this particular way in which we suffer, arising from believing ourselves to be something we’re not, then we have to be willing to look underneath the image, underneath the idea that we have of each other, and most specifically of ourselves.

Power is a very dangerous aphrodisiac to the ego; many people are deeply attracted to power. Even in our ordinary everyday world, issues of power arise. If you lead a company or you’re a manager, you’re exercising power over people’s lives; they have to fit in with the structure and power dynamics that were put in place by the people above them. Power at any level, whether its an intrinsic power or a relative power due to your position in the world, can really bring to light and activate desire, because power begets the desire for more power. In every esoteric spiritual tradition there are grave warnings about indulging in these kinds of powers and seeking out the psychic abilities that may come with awakening. The usual counsel is neither to push away or deny these powers, nor to grasp or desire or indulge in them. In Jesus’ case, what we get through the story is a vital reflection of what it means to use power wisely. Jesus is a man of great authority, great inner power, and great charisma, and people are deeply attracted to him, whether for healing or spiritual transformation or simply to be in his presence. In example after example, he wields this power with wisdom and love. Throughout the Gospels we see how Jesus utilizes power, when he utilizes it and when he pulls back and leaves things as they are. He’s a master of the wise use of power.