' True autonomy '...

So how do we find our true autonomy? It is important to remember that autonomy isn’t the same as separation. In fact, it has nothing to do with separation. True autonomy is not about “me” as an ego; it’s about life itself. It’s spirit embodying form, inhabiting a human life, and standing up in that form. The paradox is that first we often awaken from form. We come to realize that we can’t be defined by our bodies, minds, egos, and personalities. That’s why the term “waking up” is so instructive: we’re literally waking up from identity, from who we think we are. We’re also waking up from all the ideas that culture has placed within us and all the emotions to which we’ve become addicted.

Many things are within us from which to awaken, but that’s not the completion of the spiritual journey. We actually wake up, which is almost like an up-and-out process. Literally, the energy within us goes up and out. Eventually, what will happen is that same energy, that same consciousness, will then come down and in. It will begin to move in a different way. It will come back down and back into form, back into our humanness. Spirit comes back, as it were, to itself—back into body, back into mind, and back into our human life. In so doing, it begins to realize and awaken to its true autonomy, a sense of being that is quite independent, while not being separate.

It’s important that we don’t make up ideas about all this, that we don’t create a whole theory or theology about how spirit should manifest, about how it should discover its own true autonomy. Because as soon as we do that, then we’re back in the mind, and we’ve lost our freedom and illumined creativity. Of course, we can still access our minds. In this way, the mind is a beautiful tool. But if we’re used by it, we’ll quickly find ourselves back in the spinning web of egoic consciousness. We can’t have an idea of what life should look like, about how spirit should be manifesting as our very life, because all of those ideas would just be products of the past—something we learned, imagined, or desired. Once again, we find ourselves back in the unknown—not in the idea of the unknown, but in the lived reality of it. It’s the mind humbled, on its knees, with bare feet and free of the known.


~ Adyashanti ~
Falling Into Grace