Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. This episode is sponsored by Spirituality & Health magazine, bringing mindful coverage to topics that include faith, philosophy, meditation, and wellness. You can visit spiritualityhealth.com to learn more.
Today, my guest is Adyashanti. Adyashanti is a spiritual teacher, trained in the Zen tradition, who lives in northern California. Adya—as he is called by friends and students—is often described as a nondual teacher, someone who teaches about what he calls “awakening to non-division.” With Sounds True, Adya has a published a new book and audio program entitled Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic—in which Adya explores the deep, mythic underpinnings of the Gospels to show how we can find [in] the story of Jesus a source of inspiration for our own spiritual unfolding.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Adya and I spoke about his experience of Jesus’ story as a map of awakening. We also talked about Jesus as a revolutionary figure and the nature of suffering. We also talked about Adya’s own experience with excruciating physical pain and how that experience relates to the metaphor of the crucifixion. And finally, we talked about the redemptive quality of love and how love can restore us to our natural state of worth. Here’s my conversation with Adyashanti:
Adya, what’s a Zen guy like you [doing] writing, teaching, talking about Jesus? What are you doing with this Jesus phase of your teaching?
Adyashanti: Well, that’s a really good question. The “Jesus Story,” as I like to call it, has always—from the time I was a child—been a really intriguing story to me. As far back in my life as I can remember, I was always captured by this character—this really charismatic and spiritual presence. I think that’s what Jesus represented for me long before I really understood the story. It was more of a feeling, you know. A sense of a kind of transmission.
And at different points in my life, the story [has] sometimes really been de-emphasized. When I first got into Zen Buddhism, I wasn’t really paying attention to it very much. And then, after five or six years of intense practice in Zen Buddhism, I just intuitively felt something was missing. I didn’t know what it was.
You know how you start to just intuitively start to reach out? You grope around in your life for the things that you feel are missing. When I started to connect with the Christian mystics again, through [them] I kind of found what I was missing, which was really an awakening of the heart: a coming alive of the vitality of the heart.
So, once again, the story became—really, at that point it was the Christian mystics more than the story that re-enlivened the whole Christian message for me.
And then, those stories have informed my teaching. I rarely go two or three talks without invoking some story or some mention of Jesus. I will do the Buddha and any number of different spiritual figures in history. But over the years, I actually—[probably] in the last five to ten years—I got more interested in studying the actual story that I read in the Gospels. And [that meant] actually really studying the story instead of, say, the mystics and all the interpretations of the story, and the theology built around the story—but the actual story.
I really began to appreciate its mythic quality—in the sense that I think these sort of mythic stories often are a combination of some historical, factual truth that did happen and things that didn’t happen, but are actually made up—but as a means to convey something. So I think these kinds of mythic stories that get handed down to us through history and through our generations [are] maps for the inner psychic and spiritual terrain of human consciousness.
That’s what I started to see in this story. This story kind of maps itself to—it is the story of a certain inner domain of our consciousness. That began to intrigue me in the same way that I see the Buddha story—which the Buddha story is also full of mythic elements and it also maps to the terrain. And I have really gained—especially over the last five years or so—a real appreciation for these stories and these myths that are sort of maps to our inner psychic terrain. They speak to us both consciously and, I think, they also evoke emotions, experiences, and moments of insight from a very deeply unconscious place within us that comes from our heritage and living in these stories through our lives.
TS: In your book, Resurrecting Jesus, you talk about the story of Jesus as “a map of awakening.” You do so in a way that I think is quite original. I can imagine someone reading your interpretation of the Jesus story and this map of awakening saying, “Well, Adya took his own experience and mapped it onto the Jesus story. I’m not even sure I see the Jesus story that way.” Or someone could say something like that.
What do you think about that? You’ve created your own sort of “creative mapping” here.
A: Sure! I have. I have. And I think that’s part of what looking at a story in a mythic way invites us into. I think it invites us into a creative relationship with the story. So in that, I don’t think that when we look at a story in a mythic way, that therefore we just project the entirety of our experience onto the story and only understand it from our own experience. I think that it’s a combination of trying to see what the actual story itself is evoking within us—number one, what does it evoke within us? What does it reveal to us about ourselves and the world and life? And also, when we enter into a sort of creative relationship with it, I think it’s entirely appropriate that we can then start to see our own experience reflected in the story.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that the person who created the story created it with, say, the map of awakening diligently in mind. I think most myths—and [a lot of] stories—what’s in them is a combination of intentional acts of creation—that they’re intentionally bringing certain things through in the storytelling—and I think a lot of what’s in a good story or a good myth is also the author’s unconscious. Again, the inner psychic terrain of human consciousness is finding its way into the story.
So, I would be the first to admit that by putting a map of awakening onto this story—which the story is also a map of human consciousness—that, in a certain sense, I’m imposing that. But I also, at the same time, find within the story the mythic images that very much actually speak to very concrete human experiences and revelations.
I think it’s a real combination. And I do think that the images within this story very much are metaphors that are speaking directly to experiences—very deep spiritual experiences and insights. I’m looking at the story with both kinds of lenses—what’s inherently within the story that it’s trying to communicate to me, and how [the story is] creatively coming alive into me in my experience.
Of course, I’m adding my experience into it in a way that may be relevant for other people to engage with. It’s part of the themes I try to bring out right at the beginning of this book. I actually encourage people—I tell them there isn’t a “one and correct” way to look at these stories and these myths. There isn’t one correct interpretation.
The beauty is when you enter into a very intimate and profound relationship with a story and stop relating with what everybody’s told you about it for hundreds of years. But you start to enter into it yourself and you can start to—I think it is very legitimate and important to start to see, “How does this story speak to me? And how does it highlight my own story—my own journey through life?”
So I really encourage people to have their own creative relationship at the same time as I’m writing about mine.
TS: You know, Adya, I feel very comfortable with you taking a very creative approach to the Jesus story, and I want to go into this map of awakening that you find embedded in Jesus’ life story. But what I’m noticing as I’m listening to you is it seems that a lot of people feel quite proprietary about the story of Jesus being interpreted in a certain way. A Zen-trained person taking their own interpretative liberties might be offensive. I wonder what you have to say about that.
A: Well, I think I could understand that, number one. I could certainly understand that because there’s a tendency to get rigid in the interpretations that we make. Especially [with this] kind of story—it could be the Jesus story, the Buddha story, the story of Muhammad, whatever. When we invest ourselves in those stories over a long period of time and we invest ourselves in a particular interpretation of them, then to open up that interpretative lens can be very challenging.
We do sort of start to feel proprietary, as if the way I’m interpreting this or my spiritual tradition has been interpreting this is the one and only and true and right way. I think one of the things in our modern culture that we have forgotten to a large extent is that these ancient stories and these ancient myths don’t belong to one interpretation. They never did and they never were necessarily intended to.
So when we lock ourselves into [a] proprietary way of understanding something, it can actually inhibit our own spiritual growth because we’re saying that, “I will not see something differently. I will not entertain a different view than the one that I’m comfortable with.”
That’s understandable, because something within the human character does not like to be knocked a little bit off balance. In one sense, we resist that because it can make us feel a little less secure in our interpretations that we thought. But I think there’s also something within the human consciousness—within the human heart and mind—that also leans into that. [It] actually likes new vistas of discovery and likes actually stretching itself. You know?
I think that is exactly and precisely—and I think this isn’t my necessarily my personal interpretation, this is very much in the Gospel story. This is precisely and exactly what Jesus was doing. He was stretching and, in his own way, redefining the religious stories of his own upbringing and the religious points of view of his own upbringing. And it unsettled people. It made some people very unhappy, very angry. It was ultimately one of the reasons for his death.
But I think this is what we forget, because when these stories become familiar to us and we get invested in seeing them in a particular way, we lose the revolutionary quality of the founder of this whole story—[who] was an extraordinarily revolutionary person, a very challenging person, and a person who could be very harsh in his criticisms of people who held onto rigid, small views of things.
So, that happened 2,000 years ago and it happens today. None of us are immune to the resistance of feeling like we’re being stretched—to open to something beyond what’s familiar to us. At the same time, something in us, I think, yearns for those new vistas—yearns for opening in our minds and opening in our hearts in new ways we might not have expected or thought of ourselves.
TS: There’s a great quote from the book: “Jesus as a revolutionary comes not so much to comfort us as to confront us.” And it seems like this revolutionary nature of Jesus—the way that you read the story—is really important to you. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that—why that’s such an important inspiration to you. This revolutionary quality.
A: Yes. Well, I think if we’re all honest—and I will approach it from a state of real personal honesty—I think for any of us, if we’re honest [about] how we look at anything, no matter how objective we might try to be, we’re always looking at things through the lens of our own experience. We can’t really avoid doing that.
This isn’t the only Jesus that we find in the Gospels. Jesus is not only a revolutionary. He’s a comforter and he’s a healer. There’s any number of different qualities that he had in his life and that you find in the Gospels.
But this one resonates with me because I think it was at a certain point in my own spiritual life, I found that this was extremely important that I found the basis of real, authentic spirituality actually is born out of profound questioning. If spirituality is something that is authentic—which is different necessarily from religion. Religion serves a lot of cultural values of cohesion and modulating behavior. Spirituality is sort of the radiance that can function within religion. It’s the blossoming of human consciousness that can function in there.
So, from the standpoint of spirit—I think that in order to come into deeper and intimate contact with it, it always involves a challenge to our preconceived ideas. That’s not something I made up. That’s something that’s been in every single esoteric, mystical tradition. The normal ways of understanding life and oneself and these mythic stories—it’s always challenged. We’re always being stretched.
And so, because that became a real part of my own path, I saw that I couldn’t just follow a teaching—even the one that I was partaking of in Zen Buddhism. I couldn’t just follow some teaching simply because the Buddha said it, [or] because it was old and ancient and revered. I actually needed to do exactly what the Buddha counseled—which was to prove everything true or false for yourself. “Don’t take it on my word,” he basically said. Prove it all true or false for yourself. So that entails a kind of deep questioning.
When I found the courage in my life to begin to not just try to follow a teaching and do it correctly, but engage with it in and utilize it as a means to really question deeply into my own life. What are my beliefs and the preconceived ideas that I’m holding that I may not even be aware that I’m holding? What are those, and why am I holding them? Are they really true?
All of that informed the approach that I took in this book to Jesus, which was to see him as a revolutionary character. I think that’s the part of Jesus that’s probably the most potent when it comes to what I’m interested in as a spiritual teacher, which is real spiritual awakening. We have to be challenged in order to awaken. We have to have our preconceived ideas rattled. We have to look at them [and] reexamine them very deeply.
TS: One of the areas of questioning, for me—and questioning in relationship to your work, Adya—has to do with suffering. Sounds True published a book with you a couple of years ago called Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering. Now, here we have the Jesus story and we have a figure who—it certainly looks like to me—suffered. Suffered through the crucifixion, suffered in different ways. Did suffering end in Jesus’ life? Was he enlightened in that sense—that there was an end of suffering? I’m curious how you make sense of this.
A: That’s a great question! In fact, it’s one of the things that I appreciate the most about the story—is that all the human elements were not washed out of Jesus’ character. That’s very rare in the history of spiritual literature. Usually, all the sort of human parts are washed out of the god-man or the god-woman or the sage or the saint or whatever. We never hear about them. Of course, they’re almost always dead, so we can make out of them anything we want.
But in the Jesus story, those human elements remained as a very intimate and profound part of the story. I think it really goes to two things: I think that in the East, a lot of what we get in the East is a spirituality that is very focused on transcendence. The way to deal with the sorrows of life is basically to transcend life—to go beyond it as a way to find a state of consciousness [that] is untouched by the transience of life. Now, that’s one way and that’s very typical of the religions we have from India, from Asia—not exclusively, of course, but that’s in general what we get.
In the story of Jesus, we get a very, very different attitude. This attitude isn’t necessarily—his story is not saying that the way to deal with the transience and the difficulties of life is to simply transcend it, and be here but barely be here—be in some kind of transcendent haze your whole life. Actually, it is to enter for spirit, which is the truth of our being. To enter completely, fully, and in a certain sense to sacrifice the heavenly state of never being touched by anything and give itself to life entirely and completely.
Now, you can’t do that without having periods of pain, sorrow, sickness, old age, death. You’re not just going watch those from a deeply transcendent state. You’re going to actually deeply experience them.
The issue that you brought up—did Jesus suffer? Well, anybody that reads the Gospels would have to answer, “Yes.” He very, very obviously did suffer. There [were] moments when he was begging to get out of his destiny. Being nailed to a cross—to say it’s not a pleasant thing is an understatement. It’s a gruesome, awful, terrible, painful way to die.
And to put on top of all that, not just physical suffering but a kind of existential suffering. You know, when someone’s pushed to [the] extreme that Jesus did, what a lot of people do—which is they go, “God must have forsaken me. I feel abandoned. I feel left alone by the God that I’ve based my whole life on.” There, at the last moments of life, he’s screaming out, “Why have you abandoned me?”
So I think there’s actually literally a quality of awakening [that] is an embrace of the world, which I think the Jesus story really embodies. Part of embracing the world is in embracing that to completely embody yourself, to completely embrace the world here is to consent—to say, “Yes.” To give your consent to the ups and downs of life.
Now, the kind of suffering that I say we can move beyond—the kind of suffering that I’m talking about is the kind of suffering that is probably 98 percent of people’s suffering. Somewhere in that vicinity. [This is] the suffering of an ego that sees itself as separate and is basically battling itself and battling against life and battling against what it experiences, especially when things aren’t pleasant. That creates a great amount of psychic, emotional turmoil.
Jesus didn’t walk around being in emotional turmoil because people didn’t like him. When someone didn’t like him, he didn’t cower into a state of, “Nobody likes me. I guess I’m not worthy.” That kind of suffering that we can wake up from—that we can see through. We don’t have to live that for the rest of our lives.
Having said that, if we’re really, totally going to be here, we are opening ourselves. To exist is to experience pain. And I think that’s embodied in the Jesus story and, in that sense, I think it’s a very honest, truthful story. It’s very honest. It says, “OK, great. You can be the Son of God. You can dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven. And yet, don’t think that gets you out of any unpleasant experience that might come down the pike. That isn’t how it’s working. That’s a misreading of what enlightenment’s all about.”
So, I think that’s a very important message to anybody, but especially to spiritual seekers. Very important message.
TS: In your own life, Adya, was there a time when you felt more comfortable with the transcendent approach—and that that shifted at a certain point? Or not really?
A: Yes. In general, yes. In general, there were times when I really experienced a totally transcendental state of consciousness. “I am consciousness. I am presence. I am awareness. And look, it’s so lovely not to actually experience it.” It’s not affected by what happens in time and that it was never hurt and harmed, and all the beauty of that.
Yes. When that opened up for me, I think like a lot of people, I really lived in that to a great extent for a period of time. Given my character as an incarnate human being, I don’t think I was ever destined to be one of the people that wanted to hold onto that forever. That was never part of my agenda—from the very beginning, from the first day I got involved in serious spirituality I wanted to know enlightenment. That’s one thing. But an equally strong drive was I wanted—it was very important to me what my contribution to the world was going to be.
So, if you’re at all interested in how your existence here is going to affect the life around you—and the people and the situations. If that’s part of your concern like it was for me—part of what you value—that itself doesn’t lend itself to just a totally transcendent experience.
So, for a while, I was very taken with the transcendent experience when it first occurred. But it wasn’t very long before I felt that there was something else. I knew relatively soon—even though it felt like, complete and free and all those sort of descriptive ways that it gets talked about—but intuitively, I knew, “This isn’t the whole of it. This isn’t the whole of the truth. This isn’t the whole of who I am. This isn’t the complete view.” I don’t even know how I knew. I just knew that there was more to the story. And there certainly was. There certainly was.
A lot of completing that was—I think it’s why I appreciate this story so much, because it speaks to that side of the journey. It speaks to that part of the journey, which is what it is to come to grips with life as it is—with all the beautiful parts, but that’s easy for people. But [also] people not understanding you, people not agreeing with you, people not liking you, feeling isolated, feeling apart from—feeling all these things that you find in the Jesus story. [All this] as well as being inspired and wonderful, revelatory experiences.
To have it put into an actual story rather than a teaching—”This is how you work with feeling this way!” To see it in a story and to see how someone moved in their life, and to see that they didn’t move completely untouched. They moved untouched by a lot of what bothers people—by most of what bothers people. But they were not completely untouched. To be incarnated in a way that is very free and liberating takes our consent to some of the realities [of] being incarnate—to being here. You know?
TS: Adya, I’d love to get a little more clear on something that you said about suffering, because I’m very interested in this. You said how 98 percent—and I realize that this is not a math class, but whatever. The majority, a huge majority, of our suffering comes from this ego identification. And only—
A: But not only from that. But that’s kind of a catch-all phrase. Yes—but that’s a big part of it.
TS: OK. What I’m trying to get at is in our experience, how might we be able to sort out which experiences of suffering are just inherent in being a human being and having soft and tender hearts? How would you frame that, and what part is what we might call “unnecessary suffering?”
A: OK. So, let me start out by saying that I can give some sort of generalities, but people have to feel what I’m saying within themselves. If they take the concepts too literally, you’ll find exceptions to it.
But as a generality, one way to begin to hone in on what [are] the normal challenges or even difficulties of living—of being here—as opposed to the ones that aren’t actually, fundamentally necessary—that comprise the vast majority of what people experience—is, “What part of my emotional, psychological life and my experience is being derived from fear?” What part is being derived from resistance—to saying “no” to something within yourself? Saying “no” to yourself—”I’m not worthy; I don’t like myself.” Saying “no” to somebody else. Saying “no” to life—life is pretty strange right now. There’s a lot of intense things going on in life right now. Saying “no” to life.
All these ways that we go into opposition with what is creates a kind of emotional imbalance. And that imbalance is experienced—one of the ways it’s experienced—is suffering. It hurts! When we resist what is, it hurts. It’s the way life is telling us, “You’re not in harmony with life. You’re suffering because you’re resisting life, because you’re judging life, because you’re condemning life.” Or you’re doing all that to yourself. It puts you at odds with what life actually is and the result of that is suffering.
It’s not a foolproof way, but as a generality it’s actually a really useful tool to see, “Yes, what elements of my suffering are caused from my own judgments and beliefs and opinions and just plain-old resisting what is?” That’s the stuff that is actually—for the most part—unnecessary. That is not inherent within existence. It’s not like if you are born, you have to suffer all that. You don’t have to suffer all that. It’s optional suffering, I guess you could say.
TS: Could you give me an example from your own experience of non-optional suffering?
A: Non-optional suffering. OK, let’s see. Well, I can go back to—the easiest ones to get a sense of are the most intense ones. I went through a period of—
TS: That’s good. That’s good.
A: What’s that?
TS: That’s fine.
A: Yes. Some years ago, I had totally un-diagnosable—nobody could figure it out. Western medicine, traditional, anybody. I eventually figured it out myself, but it took years. I would go through these bouts of where I would have this intestinal pain that would be completely overwhelming. And I’m really good at dealing with pain. [Laughs.] For better or worse, it’s one of the things I’m hooked up to be pretty good at. Also, being an endurance athlete for so many years, you get really good at managing pain. So I am really pretty good at managing pain.
This was the kind of pain that would put my body into shock, and I would be in an emergency room at a hospital in a fetal position on the waiting room floor for hours, just shaking. It was not only pain, but there was also an element of—you can’t have that degree of pain without having a kind of suffering to it. So, there was a kind of profound pain and suffering at that moment. It was completely and absolutely unmanageable with anything I’d ever realized, with any technique I’d ever had.
I realized that if things get bad enough, everything breaks down. Everything breaks down. You can’t manage certain experiences if they get too big. It was very humbling to really realize that. To experience that was humbling.
Strangely enough, after going through that off and on for years, when I finally kind of found out how to cure it, strangely enough I didn’t come out of it with any fear. I didn’t fear it happening again. When I would look at it or if I would remember it, what would come to mind immediately—and this has never left me, to this day—was [if] I could put into words, “Adya, now you’ve experienced [that] life can and will and does turn on a dime.” It can turn immediately and unexpectedly and you can find yourself in a situation that seems unmanageable. You’re just reduced to your body going into total shock and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s part of life. That’s a reality of life.
However it comes about, these kinds of things happen. And at some point, the unexpected will happen. You’ll die. You’ll get a disease that’s incurable. Something will happen. We all have to say goodbye to the people we love most in our life. Those kind of things are not avoidable.
What I came out of it with was, “Since now I know . . .” I knew before, but it was a little abstract. Now I know in a way that’s not abstract at all that, as the Buddha said, “Everything in life is impermanent. This moment can and will change.” It can change into something beautiful and it can change into something overwhelming. What it gave me is a profound appreciation [and] a profound sense of gratitude—of well-being for even the most ordinary, unimpressive moment of life. And that’s never left me. That’s never left me.
But that experience—those experiences—were quite overwhelming. Quite overwhelming.
I was glad that that I had the background that I had and I had realized what I had, because I think that was the reason that I came out of it without fearing it. I’m not afraid of it. I don’t anticipate it. I came out of it with a sense of being really grateful for every moment of life.
And the other thing is [that] it gave me a much deeper sense of compassion. I always felt like I had some real compassion for people’s suffering and whatnot, but having gone through that, I really—it definitely deepened my sense of compassion. I’ve experienced things and I understand the overwhelm. I understand when somebody goes through something that none of what I call “the tricks of the trade”—the spiritual tricks, psychological tricks—that all of the tricks can break down if things get bad enough. You just have to be with what’s happening. You have no choice. And it’s created in me a much deeper sense of compassion for what people go through.
TS: You know, you mentioned, Adya, that with the Jesus story, you see in the story a map of awakening. And I’m curious how this experience for you—with this intense physical pain and what you went through—how would you see that fitting on the map, if you will?
A: Well, it’s not necessarily that this sits on the map of awakening as much as one of the images that really relates to it. I think that image—this can be over-dramatizing it—but I think the image of Jesus on the cross is an iconic image of someone experiencing something that’s totally overwhelming. Even more than that, feeling completely abandoned.
And so in that sense, when I was experiencing that, like I said, my realization didn’t save me from it. If there had been a certain level of physical pain—actually, to be more conscious really helps you, because you don’t live in the pain as much. But all of that kind of broke down, so it’s like all of that abandoned me.
In a certain sense, I did feel totally abandoned. And when you’re experiencing that, you know that somebody else who hasn’t experienced it—no matter how much and how compassionate and how loving they are—you know that you’re in a profound state of aloneness. I felt profoundly alone. I knew people around me couldn’t really grok or understand what I was experiencing in that moment.
So there was that sense of aloneness that Jesus went through—of abandonment. I didn’t necessarily feel abandoned by God because I didn’t have Jesus’ relational aspect. I didn’t have God as something I related to as Other. So I didn’t have that sense of abandonment. But I definitely had the feeling of a kind of abandonment and isolation and aloneness that I think is part of deep states of pain or deep states of suffering or sorrow or grief. They tend to make people feel very, very alone. And if they’re very intense, it makes you feel abandoned, because in that aloneness you feel [almost] like nothing can reach you there.
In my case, even drugs couldn’t reach me. I remember [being] in the hospital one night. I was actually teaching in a retreat and I had an attack of this. I was taken in the middle of the night down the mountain to the hospital. In the middle of the night, I’m in this hospital and I’m in this terrible state of pain. They started giving me intravenous morphine. They gave me a shot of morphine and it didn’t do anything. Fifteen minutes later, they asked me how it was going and I said, “I haven’t noticed anything.” They gave me another shot of morphine. A while later, they gave me a third shot of morphine. I didn’t feel anything. After that, they gave me another shot of something else—Demerol or some other powerful pain medication.
None of them—four intravenous shots of very, very powerful pain medicine didn’t touch it. Unfortunately for me, that wasn’t because of the pain—that was because it’s genetic make-up. My mother, I found out, also isn’t affected by opiates. They don’t actually help. They don’t work for her and they didn’t work for me. I even felt abandoned by all the drugs and things that you could be helped by, that could help lessen the pain. Nothing could lessen it for me.
So yes, that real sense of abandonment and aloneness was very much part of that experience.
TS: Let’s say someone’s listening—I’m thinking of a friend of mine who I think is going through a period like this. A period of despair and a sense of being abandoned, and nothing will help. What can you say to someone in that state that might be helpful, do you think?
A: That’s a very good question. It’s not an easy question to answer, because having experienced it, there wasn’t anything that someone told me that reached into what I was experiencing. Do you know? Reached into it and really connected with it. Even though I had a lot of love and support during those moments.
Like I said, for me, those moments came only when the pain came. I didn’t live in fear [or] despair in-between the episodes of pain. That part of the mind-state didn’t happen.
I think one of the things that I’ve found—because I have talked to people that have been experiencing that—I find that what they’ve told me is if they know someone who’s gone through something that’s made them feel like that. In other words, people that I’ve talked to—when I’ve described it—that know that I’ve gone through an experience that in some way corresponds to what they’re going through. I think it’s very, very powerful for our humanity to feel like someone comes up and says, “I really do know. I have actually been through this. I really do know.” And my knowing that sort of brotherhood or sisterhood of knowing is the comfort. That’s the connection.
Sometimes, when people really know that you’ve been through something similar—just knowing that someone else that you know or love or trust has been through it—there’s a way that it relieves the aloneness. It relieves some of the isolation—some of the abandonment, the, “I’m the only one” feeling about it.
Of course, you can’t give somebody that unless you’ve been through something that corresponds to it. But that’s the first thing that comes up. I think that’s—in many ways—the most powerful thing, which is what people connect with in the Jesus story when they’re going through something. Even as a myth, they can connect with, “OK, there was somebody who was pushed beyond the edge of their threshold. There’s company. I’m not completely alone in it.”
Beyond that—which I think can be very, very profound—just real, real love and compassion. There’s nothing special about it. I think that who we are is much more important than what we say. What we say is important, but it’s informed by who we are. And if what we feel for someone is deeply loving, deeply compassionate, I think that is our greatest gift. We don’t then have to be eloquent. We don’t then have to have all the answers for them—because, in my case, someone couldn’t do something to take it away.
Like I said, I found out what was causing the problem myself.
TS: What did you discover, Adya? What was giving you—?
A: Actually, for me, I literally discovered—after four years on and off, [I] had every test in the world, wasn’t allergic to anything, almost. I tried to eat a good diet. But totally it hit me: “OK, nobody can help me. OK. Nobody. I get it. Nobody.”
And literally the next day [after] I completely and absolutely accepted nobody had my answers, I literally just had an intuition. And it was, “Adya, just remove all the sugar, all the wheat, and all the dairy out of your diet.” My rational mind went, “Hmm, I wonder why. I don’t test for being allergic or having a problem with any of those things.” [Of] course, I knew I ate too much sugar—but that’s the kind of thing that most of us know that, who are doing it.
TS: Sure.
A: I just followed the intuition. I went, “OK.” I just stopped, right there, just like that. Within three days, the whole thing cleared up and never came back.
So, the solution was simple. I think this was a physical thing. But I think there is a correspondence to even things of deep emotional origin or existential origin within us that sometimes—when we really start to feel, “Nothing outside me has my answers,”—we can either resist that go into even greater despair. Or sometimes, like [what] happened to me, something just goes, “All right. That’s the reality. That’s the truth. Nobody has my answer. OK. I better start listening to myself and see if it’s going to come from somewhere. Just listen, listen, listen, listen, listen. See if it’ll come.”
I think, very often, the deepest difficulties that people face—that I’ve seen—the really deep stuff, the stuff that just won’t seem to go away with years of therapy or years of meditation or endless self-help programs. There [are] certain things that just don’t seem to dislodge themselves. Sometimes, when you get to that point and you go, “Nobody. I get it! Nothing has my answer for me. Nothing.” There’s something in you that stops reaching out.
As I said, you can boomerang into despair—which is a resistance to realizing nobody has your answer. Or you can just be stopped there in that deep state of unknowing-ness. And just listen like you’ve never listened before.
So often, the things in people [that] I find are the most resistant to transformation require those kinds of moments. Whether we get pushed to the edge to get to that moment or we just, without going through awful suffering, we allow ourselves to see, “Oh, I get it! Nobody has my answer! I guess it’s up to me.”
Then, sometimes—and only then—do we gain access to an aspect, a region of our own being that we often don’t have access to as long as there’s even a last little shred that said, “Someone’s going to have my answer for me.” Sometimes people do have answers that can be really helpful, but in certain areas when that last little bit lets go. there’s a way that you gain access to a kind of listening that you couldn’t get to before when you were holding out hope that somebody else was going to have your answer for you.
So I think in that sense, whether it’s physical, emotional, existential—[and] by existential, I mean of a deep spiritual nature. The existential issues of our life: Who am I? What is God? What is life? What am I doing here? These moments can force us very deeply into ourselves.
Which is part of the teaching of mythic the story of Jesus, too. “Why have you forsaken me? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Or at the Garden of Gethsemane (I’m paraphrasing): “Take this cup from my lips. Please, don’t. I see my destiny. I see what I’m going to have to go through. Please, please, anything but that. Not that.” To the point of breaking down in tears in the garden three times, and going back to his Disciples and saying, “Can’t you guys stay awake and support me? I need a little human support here. Help me out when I need it.” The moment is so intense that it literally drives them back into a state of unconsciousness, and he’s left alone in the garden.
So there, he’s pushed to his limit. “I don’t want to go through this. I don’t want to have to do this.” But then, when he confesses that human feeling—that very, very human thing. When he’s honest enough, sincere enough, and humble enough just to confess it. “I don’t want to have to do this. Please, please, please.”
When he allows himself to be human, that is what gains him access—once again. He’s realigned to his own eternal nature, when he goes, “OK. Thy will be done.”
At that moment, “OK. Take this cup from my lips—but if that’s not Your will, OK. Thy will be done.” That moment is arealigning with his core.
I’ve always found [that] he gained the realignment—he gained access to his eternal nature by being willing to fully experience his human nature. That, to me, is what’s very compelling about the story. He wasn’t running from his human nature, trying to meditate it away, hide in caves—do everything he could so that he could never have a human moment. It was almost as if he was chasing human moments. You know what I mean? [Laughs.]
He was doing things in his life that were definitely not going to make life easy for him. I think there’s a teaching in that. A complete willingness to embrace your humanity is one of the quickest ways to reconnect with your divinity. Very paradoxical.
TS: One of the themes that you talk about in the book, Resurrecting Jesus, is this idea of redemption—that we can pour ourselves into human life as a means of redemption. I wonder if you can speak about that, especially what that word means to you. “Redemption.”
A: Yes. I’ve used that word a fair amount, and understandably it causes some confusion for people because we have so many ideas about redemption and all that kind of stuff.
But the way I use the word “redemption”—what redemption means to me—and actually, there’s many different definitions of redemption. One of them that corresponds to what I’m talking about is simply, “To restore something to its state of honor and worth.” To restore something to its natural state of worth. That is, to redeem something.
The notion of redemption, I find, is really resonant within the Western human psyche especially because part of our tradition is that our very existence is flawed. The idea of original sin—that sort of notion of original sin predated both Christianity and Judaism. But they really brought it into the Western vernacular in a powerful way.
But that is part of our heritage. Two thousand years of that—of the belief that your very existence [is] somehow stained. There’s something wrong with you. If that’s part of what you grew up with—which is the number one disease of the Western psyche: a feeling of unworthiness. And no wonder, because the myth that has formed the Western psyche for well over 2,000 years has been a myth of unworthiness. You’re so unworthy that God has to incarnate himself as a Son and be killed in order to pay the ransom for how awful we are.
That’s a really heavy, dark theology to embody. Whether we accept that or we reject that, it’s still part of the collective consciousness in a very powerful way.
In the East, someone may go through difficulties, but they have the notion of compassion. Just be loving, be compassionate, and that helps heal a kind of psychic wound in their mind. In the West, that psychic wound often cuts much deeper. It cuts much more to the core. In the East—in Asia and stuff—they don’t have the idea that your birth is symbolic of an essential flaw. That’s not part of their tradition. But here, that is part of our tradition.
Because that’s part of our tradition, it calls for a deeper kind of healing. Just to be compassionate doesn’t touch that kind of deep wound that is in most people here in the West, I find.
So, when I think of “redemption,” I think of redemption as actually a kind of particular quality of love. It is the experience of a particular kind of love that when we experience it, it makes us feel almost immediately whole—healed, as if everything is suddenly, completely forgiven. Just upon touching, experiencing the redemptive quality of love.
So of course that experience got personified in the story of Jesus. Jesus becomes the human manifestation of that experience. “God so loved the world that he gave it His only begotten Son.” That is the attitude. That’s a theology, but that theology comes from an experience—an attitude of the redemptive quality of love that gives itself to sorrow. It doesn’t just hold up in its blissful state of heavenly love, but gives itself to sorrow, touches sorrow, and through that love [gives] itself—sacrificing itself in a certain way.
As soon as it touches sorrow, it immediately feels healed, as if nothing ever needed to be healed. Forgiven to such an extent that it feels as if nothing ever needed to be forgiven. That is to restore us to our natural state of worth.
Not that I don’t think that we are actually, essentially flawed in the deepest part of our existence. Most human beings get confused in their life and they have great suffering based on that. But that quality of redemptive love—when we open to it—is very, very, very powerful. It can heal that wound right up and it can heal it almost instantly when someone really, really opens to it.
It’s one of the gifts, I think, of the transmission—the energy field—of the Jesus story. It has the gift of that redemptive quality of love.
TS: What do you mean when you talk about “pouring oneself fully into the world” or “pouring love fully?” What do you mean by that?
A: First of all, I’ll come at it from an absolutely experiential basis. My experience of when this occurred to me was I’d literally felt an experience. It was as if liquid love was literally poured right down through the top of my head. It literally felt like it was just being poured into me—right down into the top of my head. It sort of pooled in the chest and the heart. It started then to radiate out from the heart.
So not only did I experience it coming in and the great healing and redemption of it, but also, when it started to radiate out from the heart, then I not only experienced it, but I could see the world through its eyes—through the eyes of that kind of redemptive quality of love. When you see the world through those eyes, you see everything as whole and of extraordinary worth. Everything and every being actually has an unimaginable degree of dignity in the depths of their being.
When I use, “poured itself,” that comes from a very literal sort of experience. Curiously enough, that’s one of the things that resonated with me right at the beginning of the Jesus story, when he goes to the River Jordan and he’s baptized by John the Baptist. The heavens split open, and, “The Spirit descends upon him as a dove,” as it says. It’s a beautiful image. The Spirit descends upon him—which is a completely different image than we get in a lot of yogic systems, where you literally wake up and out of the body.
And I’ve had that experience too. You literally wake up and out. Something literally leaves the body, in a certain sense—experientially. That’s a particular kind of awakening.
Right at the beginning of this story, [this signifies] something very different. This is not about “up and out;” this is about “down and in.” The Spirit didn’t leap from within him up and out and free itself of form. The Spirit poured itself into him—into form. That corresponded very much to that experience of having this kind of redemptive quality of love pour itself into my incarnate existence—and in doing so, transform my vision, my perception. Then I could see that this was actually also within—and in a certain sense, was—the essence of existence.
TS: So Adya, when this liquid love was poured down into the top of your head, what was happening? Were you meditating? Were you out in the woods? What was going on?
A: No. Well, in a certain sense, yes.
It was actually at the conclusion of a terrible experience. I had this very profound awakening at 25—very, very transformative. I won’t go into that in detail at the moment. I had been going to these retreats for about five years before that happened. This big thing happened and, to be honest, I hated going to retreats. I always loved the idea of going to a retreat, but as soon as I got there, I just hated it. I felt like a caged animal the entire time I was at retreat.
Somehow, I knew that I was supposed to be there and that this was actually really good for me. When I wasn’t at retreat, I would often find out why it was good for me—because that’s when I would get my realizations. That’s when I would realize what actually was occurring deep within me during those retreats that I didn’t necessarily feel at the moment.
Anyway: I really didn’t like going to retreats. So when I had this experience—great opening—I felt full of confidence. I had no fear whatsoever. All fear was taken out of my system. And I had no fear. I just looked so forward. I thought, “Now I can go to a retreat. I have no fear. I have no anticipation. This will be fantastic. This will be great.” You know—all that stuff.
So about a year after I had that experience, I ended up on this retreat, full of confidence. Really happy to be there. And it was a disaster. I felt like such a caged animal, once again. My great experience—my great revelatory moment—left me.
What I realize [now is that it] didn’t leave me, but it didn’t save me from this tremendous sense of being—again—like a caged animal. It’s hard to describe. It wasn’t that I had fear. It was that I had literally adrenaline through my system day and night.
After about the third day, I cracked. I literally couldn’t stay. They told us all, “If you’re going to leave retreat or something, tell the teacher. Tell somebody. Don’t just leave.” But I was so absolutely humiliated—embarrassed—by having to leave—devastated—that I wrote this note and waited until everyone went into meditation hall. I literally pinned it on the door of the teacher. I just couldn’t face anybody.
I got in my car and I drove away. Everything in me felt, “This is it. I had this great experience and I’ve been at this, and I really tried hard. And look where I am. I’m slinking out of a retreat.” And I just felt, “This is it. I’m done.” My quest, I guess, had failed. I was just ready to move on. “I guess I’m not cut out for it.” So it was quite devastating, in a way.
Anyway, I drive two hours and pull up to the house, and I’m in such a sort of wrung-out experience. I’m just completely wrung out. Tired, and I’ve gone through this terrible experience. I’m just wrung out. I don’t have any resistance left in me.
And I pull up in the driveway and this little voice in my head says, “Just go straight through the house, go into the back yard, and go into your meditation hut.” And my rational mind says, “Why am I doing that? I’m just giving up on this. This is it. I’m done. I’ve failed. Forget it. This’ll never come to anything.” But I had no resistance, so I just literally walked back there almost like a zombie. I just had no resistance.
I walked down. I sat down in my meditation hut, and I didn’t even really start meditating. I just sat down. I was just sitting there and I was sitting in that feeling of, “This is it. It’s over. I failed.”
Right in the middle of that moment, that’s when it all happened. This extraordinary benevolence just literally poured right into the top of my head, and just filled me up in an extraordinary way. It just came out of nowhere. Right in that moment of humiliating defeat, it just started to pour into me. It totally filled me up, and it totally transformed the way I saw everything.
I didn’t have a sense of, “OK, now I’m back on the path! I can do this!” None of that. That wasn’t even a concern. I was just so filled with this sense of benevolence and love and compassion. Strangely enough, I literally heard a voice—and I’m not a big “voice/vision” kind of guy. I heard this voice and it said, “This is how I love you. And this is how you shall love all things and all beings.”
So at that instant, I realized that whatever this is that’s happening, this isn’t given to me just for me. This is how I am supposed to see like. This is how am to live like. It was sort of a directive. It was almost like a commandment.
Anyway: I experienced that very, very profound opening of the heart. Got a call from the teacher that night. The teacher says, “What happened?” And I said, “I don’t know! I don’t know.” The teacher said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow?” And I said, “OK.” And we hung up the phone. That was the conversation.
The next day, I get in the car. I drive two hours back up to where the retreat site was—to the temple. I walk toward the meditation hall. Everybody’s gone in. I’m the last one to go in. The senior, sort-of disciplinarian person that’s running the retreating is standing [next to] one of his oldest students. He looks at me just as I’m about to walk in the door of the meditation hall. He looks at me very sternly and says, “You shouldn’t have left. And you shouldn’t have come back.”
When he said that to me, I was just filled with this joy. I wanted to reach out and hug him, because what I realized at what he said highlighted for me that I had experienced this benevolent love. It couldn’t be moved by what anybody said in judgment of anybody.
He was right, by the way. I wasn’t supposed to leave. And as far as he knew, I just showed up. I just came back out of nowhere. He probably didn’t know that I talked to the teacher or anything. So from his point of view, it was all very rational. But it’s something that easily could have devastated me. “You shouldn’t have left. You shouldn’t have come back.” You could slink back out in your devastation.
But actually, it highlighted this love and this benevolence. And I felt so grateful. In fact, to this day, every time I tell this story, I feel such, such great gratitude for him for saying just those words—because it’s like he helped set that experience into my system. It literally helped it take root, because it provided this contrast. I thought, “Wow—nothing can move this. And I can even see what he’s saying to me as loving.”
And I see it to this day. Actually, that’s how I see it.
So, that’s a long explanation. But that’s how my experience of this sort of redemptive love came in.
TS: And the words you heard were, “This is how I love you. And this is how you will love the world?”
A: “This is how you shall love all things and all beings.” That became part of my practice. Not in a phony way—not to try to love people and things that I didn’t. But it was really a way of saying, “See the world through these eyes.”
Like I said, this isn’t given to you just so you sit around and feel great. That’s wonderful. You’re healed; it’s had a transforming effect. OK. But this is also for you to express this, to embody this—to whatever extent you can. This is a gift that is given so that you give it away, not so you hoard it for yourself. And I think that that was a very, very important thing for me to recognize at that moment.
TS: And Adya, I think a beautiful way to end our conversation about the new book on Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. You know, I was going to ask you this question, which is, “How do you listen?” because I always find talking with you—whether it’s an interview or whether we’re just talking as friends—I always find this incredible quality that you have of listening. But you answered the question in the story of the liquid love. So thank you!
A: You’re welcome! I’ve really enjoyed getting to be with you, as always, Tami.
TS: With Sounds True, Adyashanti has released a new book as well as an audio series—and there’s a video teaching series as well—on Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. Also with Sounds True, Adya has a released a book and audio series called Falling into Grace: Insights on the End of Suffering. And one of my favorite book-and-audio series—check out this title—is called The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment.
Thanks, Adya, and thanks everyone for listening. I’d also like to thank our sponsor, Spirituality & Health magazine.
SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
