Keep going...

“At the age of twenty-five, after the initial awakening that I have described, I could have assumed, “Oh, this is it; this is all there is to it; I’ve seen the absolute nature of reality.” I could have gone about proclaiming to the world what I had discovered. But I was very lucky that there was a small voice inside of me that said, “This isn’t really it. This isn’t the whole of it. Keep going.”

This little voice was like a savior in a sense. Because, at that particular point in the journey, there is a great tendency to want to grasp what is seen, to claim it, own it, and then to go about making a new “enlightened self,” an “enlightened me” out of what has been realized.

I was lucky to have this voice inside. Sometimes the voice that tells us to keep going comes from outside of us—from circumstances, from life itself. Either way, it is essential that an initial awakening isn’t owned or claimed—that there is no assumption of completion.

Even though it may feel like the journey has ceased, it is important to realize that it is the old journey that has ceased, the journey toward that initial seeing, the journey where you didn’t have any consciousness of who and what you were. Now a new journey begins—the journey of expressing nondivision at every level of your being. And this is a journey that may take years to complete itself.”


~ Adyashanti