' The End Of Your World '...

With awakening there also comes a total reorganization of the way we perceive life—or at least the beginning of a reorganization. This is because awakening itself, while beautiful and amazing, often brings with it a sense of disorientation. Even though you as the One have awakened, there is still your whole human structure—your body, your mind, and your personality. Awakening can often be experienced as very disorienting to this human structure.

So it is the process that happens after awakening that I want to explore. As I’ve said, for a very few people, the moment of awakening will be complete. It will be final in a certain sense, and there will be no need for a continuing process. We might say that such people had an extraordinarily light karmic load; even though they may have experienced extreme suffering before awakening, one can see that their karmic inheritance, the conditioning that they were dealing with, wasn’t too deep. This is very rare. Only a few people in a given generation may wake up in such a way that there’s no further process to undergo.

What I always tell people is this: don’t count on that person being you. Better to count on being like everyone else, which means that you will undergo a process after an initial awakening. It won’t be the end of your journey. What I will attempt to do here is to point you in a direction that may be useful and orienting as you embark on that journey. As my teacher used to say, it’s like getting your foot in the front door. Just because you’ve gotten your foot in the front door doesn’t mean you have turned the lights on; it doesn’t mean you have learned to navigate in that different world that you’ve awakened to.

I’m very happy that this book, which is based on a series of talks I’ve given, offers me the opportunity to address this subject—the question of what happens after awakening. The information that exists on life after awakening is not usually made public. It’s most often shared only between spiritual teachers and their students. The problem with that approach is that, as I’ve said, a lot of people are now having these moments of awakening, and there is very little coherent teaching available for them. In that sense, this book is meant to be a welcoming to that new world, that new state of oneness. At this point I’d like to address those readers who are thinking, “Well, I haven’t had one of those glimpses. I don’t think I’ve really awakened.” Others may not be sure if what they have experienced is awakening or not.

Wherever you are on this path, I believe this information is relevant. For, as it turns out, what happens after awakening is relevant to what happens before awakening. In fact, the spiritual process isn’t any different before awakening than afterward. It’s just that, after awakening, the process is happening from a different perspective; you may think of it as a bird’s-eye view versus a ground-level view. Before awakening, we don’t know who we are. We think we are a separate, isolated person, in a particular body, walking around in a world that is distinct from us.

Once awakening has happened, we are still walking around in that world; we just know that we are not limited to a particular body or personality and that we are actually not separate from the world around us. It’s important to note, as well, that we do not become immune to misperception simply because we’ve had a glimpse of awakening. Certain fixations and conditionings will linger even after we perceive from the place of oneness.

The path after awakening, then, is a path of dissolving our remaining fixations—our hang-ups, you might say. So it’s not that much different from the path to awakening, which is path of dissolving certain delusions we have, certain tendencies to contract. The difference is that, before awakening, our personality structure feels much weightier, much heavier, much denser, because our whole identity is actually wrapped up in our conditioning.

After awakening we know that the conditioning of our body-mind system is not personal; we know that it doesn’t define us. That knowledge, that living truth, makes it much easier and much less threatening to address the unraveling of our illusions. So there is a great similarity in what we’re doing spiritually before awakening and what we are doing afterward. We are doing it from a different perspective;

before awakening we are doing it from the perspective of separation, and after awakening we are doing it from the perspective of nonseparation. But what we’re actually doing, the approach, the process itself, is quite similar. You might say that it’s just happening on different levels of being. In that way, almost everything I’ll be discussing in the chapters that follow can be applied to wherever you find yourself; it can be translated to your own experience.


~ Adyashanti ~
The End Of Your World