Adyashanti: Embracing the World: Resurrecting Jesus

    —
April 22, 2014

Adyashanti: Embracing the World: Resurrecting Jesus

Adyashanti April 22, 2014

Adyashanti speaks with Tami Simon about his understanding of the story of Jesus. Adyashanti is an American-born teacher trained in the Zen tradition who teaches today about the process of spiritual awakening. With Sounds True, his latest project is a book and audio program called Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. In this episode, Adya examines the deep mythic underpinnings of the story of Jesus and how it can serve as a map of awakening. He also talks about Jesus as a revolutionary figure, how the metaphor of the crucifixion helped him process his own experience with intense physical pain, and the redemptive power of love to restore us to our natural state. (79 minutes)

Adyashanti is an American-born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence. His books include Emptiness Dancing, The End of Your World, True Meditation, The Way of Liberation, and Falling into Grace.

Asked to teach in 1996 by his Zen teacher of 14 years, Adyashanti offers teachings that are free of any tradition or ideology. "The Truth I point to is not confined within any religious point of view, belief system, or doctrine, but is open to all and found within all." For more information, please visit adyashanti.org.

Author photo © Mukti

600 Podcasts and Counting…

Subscribe to Insights at the Edge to hear all of Tami’s interviews (transcripts available too!), featuring Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Adyashanti, and many more.

Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her wife, Julie M. Kramer, and their two spoodles, Rasberry and Bula, in Boulder, Colorado.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean?

Adyashanti is a widely beloved, American-born spiritual teacher whose practice is rooted in Zen Buddhism but has expanded beyond any one path or perspective. He has created many books and audio programs through Sounds True, including Resurrecting Jesus, Emptiness Dancing, and Healing the Core Wound of Unworthiness. In this episode of Insights of the Edge—which previously appeared as part of the provocative interview series Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean?—Tami Simon and Adyashanti inquire deeply into what exactly constitutes “awakening.” Adya describes his own experiences of awakening, vividly comparing and contrasting his felt sensation of each of these life-changing experiences. Tami and Adya also discuss whether awakening is a sudden or gradual process, and what one can and cannot expect from these moments of profound epiphany. Finally, Adya shares his pith instructions on how to encourage such a spiritual awakening.

Adyashanti on Awakening

Please enjoy this interview excerpt with spiritual teacher Adyashanti and Sounds True producer Mitchell Clute about The 30-Day Wake Up Challenge and some common misconceptions about awakening . . .

 

Mitchell Clute: The 30-Day Wake Up Challenge is a bold title for this new journey you’ve created with Sounds True. Can we choose to wake up? And how do the practices in this journey support the awakening process? 

Adyashanti: The whole idea of The Wake Up Challenge is really the outcome of 24 years of teaching. Early on, I saw that the first thing I needed to establish was the idea that awakening is possible. If people think, “Awakening is rare. It’s for very unusual beings and maybe I’ll get there in 10 lifetimes if I’m lucky,” they’ll tend to manifest that thought pattern in their experience and it will seem to be true, whatever meditation or inquiry or other practices they’re doing. But as soon as people begin to challenge that idea, it just makes so much possible. The biggest challenge is often opening our minds to the possibility. 

Through all my years of teaching, I’ve seen that awakening is readily available to everybody. I’ve seen it in people who really have their act together, people who have good lives and relatively well-adjusted egos. I’ve seen it in people whose lives seem to be a mess, whose egos are really struggling. They can awaken. People come to me with very difficult backgrounds, with terrible traumas very early in life, and they can awaken. And I haven’t actually seen that any one of these groups has a greater advantage in terms of awakening to their true nature. 

I used the word “challenge” because I really wanted to challenge people. When I made this program, I took the best pointing-out instructions that I’ve developed over the years to induce insight. It’s not a program about processing your emotions, or about healing, or even about your spiritual path—though all those are an important part of life. It’s really narrowly focused on awakening to one’s true nature. 

I’ve been interested in making this program for over a decade now, and one day I thought, “I’ve thought about this long enough. I’d better just sit down and do it.” It was one of the most enjoyable—and challenging—things I’ve ever recorded. 

 

MC: One of the misperceptions it seems people have about awakening is, “If I just awaken, life will be good.” We believe that somehow, in light of that experience, clarity will automatically come to our relationships, our work, and our own journey. 

A: That’s an important point, because a lot of people hold this misperception. It’s a little disappointing to hear that awakening doesn’t instantly fix everything, but the truth is always more freeing than whatever our fantasy about the truth may be. Awakening is always one of the most seminal, transformative experiences we can have in life. And it does have a bleed-over effect into other dimensions of our life—the make-up of our healthy ego structure, our relating, our healing. But each of these areas of life—including emotional development, relational IQ, and personal healing work—[is] each a separate line of human development. They all interact together. But I’ve never met anybody who had an awakening and suddenly had an A+ ability to relate when they didn’t before, or suddenly healed everything that needed to be healed. It doesn’t happen that way; it didn’t happen that way for me. 

Awakening seems to have a different effect on different people. For some people, it transfers to their lives to a great degree, but we all have parts of our lives that need attention, that aren’t instantly clarified even with the deepest awakening. That’s just part of human life. But I think we can approach all those areas of life from a more benign position if we’ve had some taste of our true nature. Then, even if we have to do some healing work or emotional maturity work, we know through our own experience that we’re not coming from a place of lack, because we’ve really touched upon our unconditioned nature—that which is always and already complete.

So, awakening is always one of the most transformative moments in a person’s life, and can become a foundation from which to address other issues from a state of wholeness and with less fear or existential dread. But it’s not a magic cure-all for everything. 

 

MC: In Zen there’s the idea of “always being, always becoming”—of attending to both our humanness and our essential nature. But many students, and even some nondual teachers, seem to put all the emphasis on the being, our eternal nature, and almost nothing on the becoming. 

A: I think that’s something within human nature; we all want our securities. We’d all like to live in a world of absolutes, feeling if we could just find those absolutes we’d be safe and not be subject to the challenges of being and existing. 

Every dimension of consciousness has its own delusions. One of the delusions that is almost always inherent in awakening or the revelation of our true nature is a sense of confidence. We think, “Oh, this is it,” because we’re touching upon what is always and already complete. This confidence can tie right into our unconscious desire for fixed, final conclusions, because they provide a sense of security. 

Also, most people come to spirituality through some degree of suffering and difficulty. There’s a big motivation to want to have an experience that will put all that suffering behind you. Psychologically, we’re caught living in denial. We think, I’m done, I’m finished, I’ve realized an absolute truth and now I’m not subject to all these other aspects of being a human being. These delusions are inherent in the revelation of true nature, because any time we touch upon a facet of our true nature it feels whole and complete. 

But in the end, we realize we’re embracing a paradox. That which is always whole and complete is also always in a state of becoming. To me, this is the real nonduality. It’s not going back and forth from one side of duality to the other—from “I’m a human being” to “I’m spirit or consciousness.” Reality embraces this paradox of both sides. Always being, always becoming. A human being and pure spirit. It’s the nature of a more mature realization that we can not only see but begin to embody these paradoxes. 

 

MC: The 30-Day Wake Up Challenge has four parts. There are sections on the three types of awakening—the mind, the heart, and the ground of being—and a final section on how to put these insights into practice in our lives. Why did you present them in that order, and what do we need to bring to make the most of these teachings? 

A: I offered the teachings in the order they’re generally easiest to approach. As you know, I talk about awakening on the level of mind, heart, and gut or ground of being, and mind is usually the easiest one. They often unfold in something like that order, but not always. 

In my case, my first awakening was to the ground of being. Since I grew up dyslexic, my whole spiritual unfolding was dyslexic! It was backwards. But the reason I arranged the journey this way is simply that for many people it happens that way.

The power of our own honesty with ourselves plays such an important role. We can have revelatory and amazingly transformative experiences, but at the end of the day, our honesty about our own experience is going to tell us, “Oh, this seems to need more work,” or “I’m actually suffering in this area of my life,” or “Relationships seems to be an incredible mystery to me, and my awakening didn’t seem to give me great relational intelligence.” If we’re honest, we’ll see it, we’ll identify it, and we’ll focus on that for awhile. 

If there’s still healing work to be done, we can live in denial. It’s common in spirituality. People think that if they keep going back to the transformational experience over and over, it’s going to make everything else go away. But if we remain honest and don’t use that experience as a place to hide, then our awakening can give us real clarity, so that it becomes clear what we need to work on. 

And it’s hard for human beings to do—to simply be honest with ourselves. It sounds easy, but it’s not easy. But our experience tells us what needs attention. When we have an emotional or psychological or spiritual “ouch” that’s the way our system gives us feedback. It’s not mysterious. It’s not hidden from us. 

So there’s work to do after awakening. But we can also indefinitely postpone awakening by believing that we need to be some sort of semi-perfect being before it can ever happen, and that’s simply not true. 

 

Continue your awakening with our brand-new journey with Adyashanti, The 30-Day Wake Up Challenge. We begin Thursday, August 15.

LEARN MORE

Awakening the Spiritual Heart with Adyashanti

Adyashanti is an American-born spiritual teacher whose work adheres to no single tradition, but points the way toward awakening for all seekers. He has published many books and audio programs with Sounds True, including The Most Important Thing, The End of Your World, and Resurrecting Jesus. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Adya (as his friends and students call him) about The 30-Day Wake Up Challenge, an upcoming online course designed to take listeners on a journey through the layers of awakened consciousness over the course of a single month. Tami expresses her excitement about the course and asks Adya whether it’s really possible to “wake up” in just a few weeks. Adya talks about the liberation of dropping into the Spiritual Heart, leading listeners in a practice for touching this sublime, compassionate inner space. Finally, they discuss the everyday applications of touching awakened awareness, as well as why The 30-Day Wake Up Challenge has been one of Adya’s intensive projects.

(66 minutes)

You Might Also Enjoy

Rainn Wilson: Standing for a Spiritual Revolution

How do we reimagine society and build it anew upon a foundation of love, unity, and compassion? This is the central question Rainn Wilson explores in his new book, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. In this podcast, Tami Simon sits down with the actor and comedian to learn, in Rainn’s words, “Why the hell is the actor who played Dwight in The Office writing a book about spirituality?”

Enjoy this inspiring conversation that is at once funny, clever, and sincere, as Tami and Rainn discuss the cultural critique of people on a spiritual path; connecting with others from both our brokenness and wholeness; God, higher powers, and belief in a great mystery; the radiant word “devotion”; finding your authentic voice; the need for a spiritual revolution in our times; creating a new mythology; the potential pitfall in being “spiritual but not religious”; the Latin word “religio”—to bind together; the Baha’i faith; Rainn’s advice to don’t just protest—build something; the maturation of humanity; keeping hope alive and fighting for joy; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com

Mark Nepo: The Half-Life of Angels

How do we know our own authenticity? How can we return to our hearts when we find we’ve left them? As we evolve and change along our journey, how do we relate to the “former selves” in our past? In this podcast, Tami Simon and poet-philosopher Mark Nepo address these questions and more, as they discuss his creative process; his new book, The Half-Life of Angels; and how we can each touch the ever-present and wholly miraculous “spark of becoming” waiting to guide our lives. 

Tune in as Tami and Mark talk about the introspective nature of the creative process; the metaphor of the soul as an inlet; congruency; how the heart shatters but inevitably heals; becoming a student to the mystery of life; the meaning of the word “admit,” and the practice of return; seeing through the lens of the miraculous; the intersection of meditation and creativity; the art of re-visioning; how a commitment to truthfulness grows in concentric circles; living from the deep versus diving and coming back up; the shift from being driven to being drawn; impermanence and perseverance; how the life of expression is one of discovery, relationship, and inquiry; why “there’s always a teacher next to you”; “becoming the poem”; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

Forest Bath Right Down This Path

Dear Readers, I’m excited that my new picture book  Forest Bath Right Down this Path is part of the Sounds True Kids collection. It’s a book of my heart as it portrays a fog forest—Barred Island Preserve—that my family and I hike every year on our summer vacation in Maine. I’m thrilled that you can enjoy this forest through the window of Khoa Le’s gorgeous illustrations.

As we wander the forest’s moss-lined paths, we smell pines and firs, touch bark and berries, and listen to birds and chipmunks. The hike ends at a rocky beach where we swim and explore tidepools. When we leave, we feel peaceful and calm. The name for this kind of soothing experience is forest bathing.

There’s evidence that smelling chemicals from trees called phytoncides and microbes from soil called mycobacterium vaccae may reduce stress and boost immune function.

I work as a child psychiatrist to help children, teens, and adults, and I’m always looking for ways to help people manage stress and anxiety. Some of the recommendations I make for doing this include exercise, taking time away from screens, meditating, and connecting with family and friends. I try to do these things myself, too! Every morning I take a half hour walk through the woods near my home.

I’m also a parent of two children (now young adults), and I’ve been concerned about the ways phones and screens are interfering with paying attention to the natural world as well as one another. It’s known that spending a lot of time on social media is contributing to the worsening of teens’ mental health. Adults need to take time away from their phones, too. That’s why the main character of my book, Kayla, encourages her father to put away his phone and fully engage in their walk through their forest. Children want their parents’ undivided attention; often they’re the ones encouraging adults to turn off their phones and be present.

I hope this book inspires you to spend time with your loved ones outdoors and soak in all its beauty and mental health benefits. Happy forest bathing!

Wishing you fresh air and sunshine,

Lisa Robinson

P.S. I invite you to download the free story time kit with five activities for children to learn more about forest bathing—from heading out on a sensory expedition to exploring their senses to making art in nature.


Lisa Robinson is a therapist, picture book writer, and nature enthusiast. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Every summer her family travels to coastal Maine for two weeks. The highlight of the trip is a walk through Barred Island Preserve on Deer Isle. The animals and plants mentioned in her new children’s book, Forest Bath Right Down This Path, are all found there. Learn more about Lisa and her work at author-lisa-robinson.com.

>
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap