' No-Thing '...

In the past, the deepest spiritual teachings were reserved for a very small part of the spiritual population. Those were the people who became monks or nuns or sadhus (renunciants), and committed their entire existence to get the teachings. You couldn’t get the teachings until you’d done that, walked away from family and friends and life as you knew it, and put everything on the line. And even then, teachers wouldn’t give the teachings to you immediately. They’d probably make you wait some years. Why? Because those few enlightened beings knew that to really take awakening to enlightenment or liberation was going to require that kind of commitment, that kind of love of the truth, and the kind of person who would put all their eggs into that basket, right there.

Today you do not have to live in that rarified spiritual environment or commit your entire life to get the teachings of the truth. And yet, to realize the truth and then take it all the way into living and being what you really are, fully and completely, the internal commitment is not any less. It can’t be any less because nothing less than a full, internal love of truth will do. If you love anything more than you love the truth, there’s no way this realization can complete itself. You can realize it, you can awaken, and you can have a nice enlightenment experience, but it’s not going to be something that’s going to be stable and effortless, or last forever. That’s just the physics of it. I’m not writing the rules. It’s just the way things are.

When you realize the truth, then you know that this truth is not fooling around. This truth wants you, and it wants your life, and it’s going to devour you and eat you up for dinner. The truth is not playing games. I’ve had more than one person say, “Adya, how do I turn this off? How do I back out of this deal? This isn’t what I signed up for.” And the only answer is, “Sorry, it’s too late, you can’t back out. You can walk away from me and from all teachers, and from spirituality altogether. You can go to the end of the earth and play some other game, but it’s too late. You can’t unrealize what you realize.” It’s a game until it’s not, but by the time you realize that it’s not a game, you can’t back out.


-Adyashanti
Excerpt from: Mountain View, California, March 13, 2003.