' You just don't know it '...

You may or may not realize that, but right now you are awake. You're just as awake as you are in deep meditation. That awakeness or awareness is just as aware of my voice speaking now as anything else. It's complete, it's whole, and it's never going to be more than it already is. It's already there. This is why all true spiritual teachers have always said that you're already enlightened, you just don't know it.

So the question then becomes, how do I know it? Then you have to start to deeply question all your assumptions about yourself. We have so many assumptions about who we are and what we are, but when we question these, they crumble quite quickly. Then we come into a place where we don't know who we are. And finally, we become very sure that we don't know who we are.

You come to see that every way you define yourself is just a concept and therefore a lie. The mind just stops because it has nowhere to go. The stopping, of course, can't be practiced because any practice stopping is just a fake. This stopping happens as a result of insight, of wisdom, of understanding, and nothing else. It's not a technique. That's why this is the path of wisdom. When the mind understands its own limitation, it stops, and that's very natural. The mind only keeps working to find itself when it suffers under the illusion that it can find itself. When it realizes it can't find itself, it stops because it knows there's nothing for it to do.



- Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing