Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Mukti. Mukti is an associate teacher at Open Gate Sangha in northern California, which she cofounded with her husband, Adyashanti, in 1996. In her own teachings, Mukti points audiences back to their natural state of wholeness or undivided consciousness. [She] brings flavors of feminine quietude and nurturing, as well as kinesthetic, visual, and precise pointers to truth. With Sounds True, Mukti has recorded a six-session audio learning series entitled The Self in Full Bloom: Teachings and Practices for Embodied Awakening.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Mukti and I spoke about different definitions of awakening and how to understand why some people—after a dramatic awakening—still exhibit behaviors that seem self-oriented and self-motivated. We also talked about Mukti’s own experience of awakening and how it changed her experience of being a person. I also talked to Mukti about her relationship with Adya—the inside story. And finally, Mukti offered us a practice in embodied self-inquiry. Here’s my conversation with Mukti:
Mukti, to begin with, I’d love to talk with you about a subject that you address in your new audio series, The Self in Full Bloom I’d love to know what you see is the difference between a “disembodied” awakening and “embodied” awakening.
Mukti: OK. That’s a fantastic question that I haven’t heard before, actually. Well, in my experience—from the people I have worked with, as well as my own personal experience—if a more sudden awakening occurs, where there’s a falling-away of the personal identity and a sense of direct knowledge of our nature as spirit [and] as reality—there is usually a following period of any number of years, really. [A period] in which that knowing of reality that comes into that incarnation of that person begins to really inform that person’s movements, expressions, and their whole way of being.
So, during that time period—as that knowledge of reality is really taking up residence in a very functional way—there can be some transition happening with the person who may have vestiges of the construct of the previous paradigm of living [that] they operated from prior to that awakening. In which case, their actions express through those vestiges of the previous paradigm—as well as those expressions finding their way through this new paradigm of awakened living. As that transition occurs, there can be a greater or lesser degree of functionality in that embodied expression of the new paradigm.
So, it really depends upon which vestiges remain in a given person—how that expression of awakening will look. I guess that I would say that disembodied awakening would be expression in the world that doesn’t reflect the conscious knowing of one’s nature as spirit or as truth. You could also call disembodied awakening “unconscious activity,” or activity that is perhaps influenced by previous conditioning or illusions.
It really looks different according to [the] person. I remember hearing an analogy once, early on when I was listening to Adya’s teachings, where he spoke about awakening as though it was a jump on a bungee cord where you went from A to Z. At some point, as the bungee cord tightens again after being stretched, you may land back somewhere at D or J or M.
Where you land back at kind of reflects how much of that thoroughness of awakening will function more fully in expression and how much of it will be reflective of your former life and your former, conditioned expressions.
It just really varies by person. Each person’s personality will influence the specific types of expressions. If you want, we could talk about that more. I could talk about my own personal experience.
TS: Yes. Let’s hear a little bit about that. In your life, did you have a sudden breakthrough—like the kind that you’re describing sometimes happens?
M: Yes, I did. We could also talk about awakenings that are not so sudden. I was just trying to present it in a more simplified way for the time we have here.
Yes—I had a more sudden awakening [that] occurred. Very sudden in some ways. And yet, looking back, there was so much leading up to it that could be said to be a gradual—I’m not sure of the right word. Sort of a gradual influx of consciousness prior to that sudden awakening.
On the heels of that, certain obvious parts of my personality structure fell away. Other parts didn’t rear their head until later on—months or years down the road. Parts of how I developed as a human being earlier in my life. I became more conscious of them, was able to look at those afresh, and basically liberate those patterns as well.
Initially, the one that I remember most clearly is this sense of so much fear [falling] away. Initially, it felt like the notion of fear wasn’t so comprehensible. In particular, I had been studying Chinese medicine at the time. I had been studying all these different diagnoses of different patterns of imbalanced health and disease. As a student, as I was learning those patterns, I would feel like I was referring to my own direct experience of these energetics, in these patterns. I literally felt like I could have either all of these diseases—that they could happen sometime in my future given my set energetic patterns of health.
After that, there was just a completely different relationship to my studies of this energetic medicine. There was just no fear at all that they related at all in any way to my personal health or personal body in any way.
Just like some tendencies of hypochondria. I don’t know that it was so severe, but some tendency in that direction completely fell away. A lot of my conversations changed. I wasn’t talking about my health or what I was doing for my health or things like that. I think people who knew me well noticed it, for sure, because it had been a huge, huge percentage of the conversations that my days would involve.
TS: So, Mukti, you’ve been telling us about the before and after. But I’d love to know more about the actual awakening itself. “Awakening” in your experience.
M: OK. I’m going to start just a little bit more before the awakening, to set the stage.
I had been studying with Adya for the better part of a year. He had the greatest influence, I believe, on the events that led up to the awakening—meaning he had been really teaching me about the nature of a different type of meditation than I had been exposed to before. He—for the first time—really exposed me to self-inquiry. I was following his instruction on that on a regular basis and exploring self-inquiry.
In particular, I became interested in a question that I took for my own—meaning it wasn’t one that he had suggested or assigned. The question that I really felt the most engaged in was the question, “What is rest?”
It had a context in which—at the time, I was just exceedingly busy, working multiple jobs and going to school full-time. I knew that some of those various frontiers that I was busy in would wrap up soon. So, I just continued to remain in them. While I was doing that, I felt like I had very little time for my spiritual practice. I lived with this question, “What is rest?” during my activity during my day.
What surprised me about this inquiry was it started out as something that almost felt like a kind of survival. Like, “How do I find rest and equanimity amidst all this activity?” It felt almost necessary just to be able to function well—was to tap into that sense of rest.
So, it had a personal element. But when it really started cooking was on Adya’s first retreat, when he gave this talk on the nature of stillness. I was listening and I really could tell that he was speaking of stillness in a way that I didn’t know. I didn’t know the kind of stillness that he was talking about. I knew the kind of stillness of a ball that’s rolling around on the ground—like, rolling to a stop. His sense of stillness was something that my mind couldn’t put a picture on. But I could feel it as he was talking—that it was something very much functioning and expressing in this moment.
I sat in meditation later that night at the retreat—alone, after everyone had gone to bed. I dropped the question, “What is stillness?” into my being. I dropped it in a way that he had instructed us to do—which is to sit as though we were sitting as a lake. Like a clear mountain lake. The surface of the lake was at the top of our heads.
I was sitting and I felt like, “OK. The surface of the lake of my being is just on the flat of the top of my head, and I’m going to drop a question like it was a smooth pebble or stone into that lake. That stone is going to be imbued with this question: ’What is stillness?’”
And I let my awareness—my soft attention—just follow that stone into the depths of my being. I just let it ripple throughout the room and beyond the room. I let the whole feeling of this word “stillness” and this sense of stillness—as it rippled—just sing to my whole system, my whole body, and my whole being. My thinking mind; my attention; my body; everything mapped to this rippling of stillness in awareness.
I just merged with that sense. I just joined that sense.
Once I felt like all the energies in my body from head to toe—like head all the way down into the earth, where I was sitting on the cushion. I just felt like all of that energy returned to that stillness. When I had a sense that my physical form and the energies of thought and sensations were as still as they possibly could be, my attention spontaneously went out into the surrounding room and the surrounding world beyond the room—where I could hear frogs and a creek running by and crickets. I just let my consciousness explore—not explore in a seeking way, but my consciousness just delved into whatever sense of stillness I could sense in the larger world. I just merged with that sense.
There was also this sense that what was curious about it was—paradoxically—entering that like a movement. But also, what was looking was also very still.
So, it all kind of merged into a sense of stillness. When it all felt like it was taken as far as it could, I got up and I went to bed. I went to sleep and I laid down in a certain position. I remained in that position the whole night, and my consciousness went into this sense of formless awareness.
What it felt like—looking back—is that the whole construct of who I took myself to be just merged into that formless awareness. Later the next day, some hours into the day, I was going about my day [and] I was all of a sudden in a situation at breakfast. I was eating on the carpet. We were all sitting on the floor. Somebody started doing these full prostrations to me. I was just looking at this woman doing these full prostrations to me, and all of a sudden it was as though I had some self-awareness that I was a person. Whereas prior to that, the whole morning, it was kind of traceless existence.
When I saw the bowing in front of me, I just broke out in spontaneous laughter. The sense was that what was looking out my eyes and what inhabited the house of my body was this sense of eternity or [was] empty of the previous owner of the house. Empty of my personality; empty of my path. But almost like—for the first time—I got the sense of what the [phrase] “Holy Ghost” might mean. Just this sense of no one home but eternity looking out of my eyes.
I think there was just this spontaneous laughter because it struck me as so funny that she would be bowing to this that had no owner.
As the day went on, just spontaneously, that sense of emptiness—or you could say, almost a sense of the formless awareness looking out my eyes—was taking in the world around me, and spontaneously it was as though something flipped inside. That sense of what was looking out at the world just realized, it recognized itself as all of existence. The very thing that felt empty and formless that was looking out realized that it was all the forms [that] it was looking at.
So, even though I know that as I’m describing it, it sounds like I’m describing an experience—and I am—what I came to know—not personally came to know, but what presented in this movement of formless awareness [recognized] itself as form and became realized in this form of this world. I realized that that is not an experience, even though I’m describing an experience. [It is] hard to say what it is. But that is an expression that points to something beyond or prior to experience.
TS: So, since this event—I don’t know, whatever we want to call it. Let’s just say “Mukti’s sudden awakening.” Have there been times when you’ve found yourself acting like a terribly unawakened person? You talked about how there’s not as much fear of getting a disease, but you know, just like: “Wow! Angry, vicious, jealous, et cetera. I’m tense in my body. I feel separate. Et cetera.”
M: I could say yes to some of those. Yes. I think that, since then, there’s been times where my behavior felt off. You know—where it just didn’t feel like it was in alignment with the deeper truth of the knowing that I was just describing.
However, even if I have had since then emotions that—let’s say, I was angry. What was really different, for example—I don’t tend to be a very angry person, but I’m just going to take that one as a [juicier] example. What was different was that it was as though I couldn’t be angry at anyone or anything. It’s like the anger is there and there’s the frustration of not knowing how to bring what’s happening into alignment.
Simultaneously, there’s this awareness that the various ways that relating happen between people—myself and another, or another and another—that it’s as though they’re patterns relating to patterns. The patterns have not come into harmony.
It’s not like I was able to tell myself all this stuff. Like, “Oh, this is a pattern relating to a pattern.” But what I did recognize was [that] it felt like [it was] impossible for me to be mad at a person even if their actions are something that are triggering a response in me. There was just this knowing that it was not about them. Essentially, that it was not about me—in terms of it was not about my essential nature or their essential nature. It was more playing out on the surface, so to speak.
TS: You know, I think one of the reasons I started our conversation with “embodied” versus—if you will—“disembodied” awakening is I’ve met so many people now—being in my role here at Sounds True—who have claimed to be “awakened.” And yet, I’ve felt in their presence various huge, unconscious separateness. I mean—I can just feel it when I’m with them. I don’t feel the sense of open, vast space. I feel something like judgment or positioning or separate self-ambition. Something like that.
And I think, “Well, maybe they just haven’t ‘embodied’ their awakening yet.” Then, my next thought is, “Then why do I care very much about their awakening, since it’s not manifesting in a beautiful way in this moment?”
So I’m curious what you think about all of that. So many people [are] running around having had awakening experiences, and yet their behavior—in many cases, to me—seems like, “What?” Do I just say that they haven’t fully embodied it yet? It makes me question what people refer to as “awakening.”
M: Absolutely, yes. Yes. I definitely have a lot that I’d like to say about this. It’s kind of tricky. So, me speaking to that, I can only speak from my direct experience. Anyone can only speak from their own direct sense of this, right?
In my view, when I talk to people in my role as a spiritual teacher, I talk to various people. They’ll come in and they’ll talk about their awakening. Often, I don’t even ask if they’ve had an awakening, or if they mention an awakening sometimes I’ll ask them to describe it. But mostly, I don’t necessarily focus on it.
Let’s say a person comes in to talk to me and they’re [saying] that they assume that they’ve had this awakening. Part of my role is to assess what their definition of “awakening” is. How has their paradigm or their perspective of living shifted? Because there’s all different kinds of awakenings. There’s many, many different kinds of awakenings.
So, for example, there can be an awakening out of a pattern of seeking—like all seeking ceases. There can be awakening out of a core hub of the ego structure. There can be awakening to emptiness. Awakening to oneness. Awakening to universal love. There [are] just tons of kinds of awakenings, let alone just having a tremendous, life-changing insight—which can also be its own kind of awakening.
People are using the term in tons of different ways. Part of my job and my role is to assess how they’re using it. Sometimes, I’ll ask clarifying questions for that, or sometimes I’ll just glean from what paradigm they’re speaking from. I’ll just get a sense of it.
I think the more you spend time around a person, the more I could get a sense of what areas of their being that awakening has penetrated and not penetrated.
TS: Now, I’m curious how you would apply that to yourself. So, in terms of your definition of awakening and if you had to—you know, sort of splitting you into the “teacher Mukti” and the “person coming in to see you Mukti”—
M: Yes, that’s fine.
TS: Would you be willing to say, “Oh! This is where I see Mukti’s awakening penetrating or not penetrating?”
M: Yes. Well, the tricky part of the whole way of this kind of thing is that—like I was saying earlier—there’s a way that you can travel from A to Z, like on the bungee cord. So, you can know your ultimate nature—not even your nature. But you can know the nature of reality that expresses through your human consciousness as awakening dawns, right?
So, that knowing can be present, but it may not have penetrated certain patterns that may lead to behaviors that just have some sense of being out of alignment with reality.
That’s one way of talking about what you just said. I could talk about my patterns, if you want, to some extent—if that’s of any interest.
But I think a more interesting way of answering the question would be: My sense is that—as I described the awakening experience earlier—there was this sense of existing without any self-consciousness for several hours after I woke up that morning and was walking around at the retreat, functioning. It was in the moment that the woman was fully prostrating to me that there was sense of this realization of the nature of eternity.
And so, in that moment of realization, there’s this tentative thing that happens in this whole realm where—when some degree of self-consciousness returns—an identity can solidify around that. Like, for example, that’s when you get some people who have really awakened egos or things like that—where most all of their ego is still there. But there’s still some sense of what they are that’s beyond ego.
In my case, there was this sense, for many days, of kind of living with just the lightest sense itself. It wasn’t so much even like a small personal self, but just this sense of what’s sometimes called “Big Self” or “Universal Self.” So, there is a way of being where there’s a functioning in this world of time and space without any sense of self. Earlier, I was calling that “traceless being.”
But then there’s also some sense of operating from more of a sense of self—even if that’s the self called “consciousness knowing itself in form.” Then there’s that solidifying even further to a sense of identified, me, personal self.
For me, what I feel has happened over the years is some fragments of the very, very personal me-self returned and layered back on that very thin veneer of Big Self, you could say. As they returned, I’ve had opportunity to really attend to those strands of remaining construct and to offer them means to their own liberation—like liberating the patterns themselves.
But, at this stage in my journey, there’s still just the slightest vestiges of a sense of self. That’s how I would describe it. Of course, I’m assessing myself, which isn’t always the best in certain circumstances—like the doctor treating herself. But there’s just this real, direct sense [of] having visited Z in that bungee jump from A to Z. There’s just some sense that I’m having those last holdouts of some sense of self that feel [like they are] falling away.
[At this point,] I don’t feel that there’s quite as much that I can do to attend to that falling-away. I don’t even have an opinion as to whether it should fall away. I know that it can, in the sense that I’ve really followed, say, Adya’s teachings and some others about the nature of no-self. And I have a very deep sense of what that no-self is, having such a clear dip into that.
But I think only a sense of self would have an opinion as to whether that should be the goal or the outcome. I don’t really entertain it that way.
TS: Yes. That’s helpful. Thank you, Mukti. Even though someone from the outside—the doctor who could assess the patient—on the other hand, it’s always good to talk to the patient about what their experience is like. I think that that’s so helpful for people, because I think there’s so much confusion about awakening. As you said, people are using the same word to describe very different states of being and states of realization.
M: Yes. Absolutely, yes.
And from each perspective, it can feel so dramatic—those awakenings. It can feel like such a shift that it can almost feel inconceivable that there can be any other shift or any larger context. You know what I’m saying?
I think probably the most common kind of awakening would be awakening to the nature of awareness. That tends to register and take up residence more above the neck. Now, I’m speaking more energetically. There’s a way that—when consciousness moves into the form of the mind, body, emotional body, energy body, and all of that [in] the human form—there’s a way that it can really take up residence in certain centers of the being. Adya has talked about these a lot, which is where I’ve learned to speak about them too—which is from the head, heart, and gut.
But he wasn’t the only one. You look at qigong—they talk about the three dantians. The Upper, Middle, and Lower [are] completely mapped to the head, heart, and gut, and have been spoken about for centuries.
But there can be this way for many, many people who experience awakening, [wherein] that Upper Dantian or head center opens to be available to consciousness or awareness—to perceive the world through this center of the head. Those perceptions are dramatically different than the perceptions through the mind or through the head from a sense of separate, egoic self that has no—not “no.” But hasn’t been significantly penetrated by that wakefulness.
From that perspective of awakening on the level of mind, the mind that would assess anything with respect to, basically, the world of time and space—that would track things, monitor them, assess what’s happening. When that feels awake, it concludes that the whole person is awake.
But there [are] so many other ways that our vehicle functions—like, for example, the functioning of the heart or the functioning of—I don’t know—the energy bodies, the chakras, the gut, the instincts. There’s so many other types of functioning that completely bypass assessment of mind or even the directing of one’s focus or attention of mind. They work in just a completely different paradigm.
So, unless those are also awakened, the person who has an awakening on the level of mind just assumes like it’s done. They could assume that and not realize that there [are] so many other ways that consciousness can express through their human vehicle.
TS: Yes. I might say that a “disembodied” awakening would be an awakening from the head up, you could say. Not that the head’s not part of the body, but from the neck down [is] what’s really going on in this person.
M: Yes. I mean, it’s possible to have an awakening in the gut or in the heart or something before the head. You could maybe call that disembodied, too. But I think that it’s most common in the head.
Also, there’s a way that because the head is the uppermost center, it can have this feeling of being disembodied because when awareness really penetrates the lower centers, it’s moving towards the earth. It just maps more closely to our connotations of what “embodied” means, because “embodied” implies “in form.” Our whole way of sensing what form is often relates very directly to matter, earth, and concrete. So, it just kinesthetically feels more embodied when the awareness moves down and roots more.
TS: Now, Mukti, there’s another topic that I want to talk to you about. So, I’m going to move on here, because there [are] a couple things I’d like to make sure we cover.
This next topic has to do with how in the audio series, The Self in Full Bloom, you mention early on how Adya is not just your husband, but you also consider him to be your spiritual teacher. And I thought, “God, I wonder what that’s like.” As I was reflecting on this, I looked at my partner and I thought, “Well, you know, being a partner feels so different for me than how I associate the way that someone would feel about their spiritual teacher—one that you look up to and put on a higher plane, if you will, than yourself.” They are more evolved than you are, versus being an equal partner.
So I’d love to understand that, for you.
M: It has evolved so much over the years because I was really present when Adya first stepped into a teaching role or started a teaching role, which was—gosh—about 18 years ago or something. So, it’s changed a lot over time.
But I think maybe what might feel more relevant to the question is kind of going back some number of years. Probably, from the beginning, I would just say that there was a way that, somehow—well, probably the very beginning. And I won’t tell you a huge, long story—I hope.
Before I met Adya, I was asked a question once: “What do you most want in a partner?” And I gave it a lot of thought. Not just thought, but contemplation in my being. Two of the main things that I remember [included] that I wanted someone with an orientation to develop spiritually to the greatest extent possible in this life. The other thing that I set an intention for was that I wanted a partner who could challenge me in this way—that when I was with them, I would be inspired in that endeavor even more.
And so, even from before I met him, something got set into play where the two roles of partnership and teacher were already intertwined. But what happened when it actually started to play out was both he and I just somehow—by some grace—kind of naturally would put on our husband-wife caps and then we’d take them off when we went into the room where he would put on his teaching cap.
TS: Didn’t you ever think, “I’d like to put on my teaching cap and have you come in, because I have some observations about you as well.” That’s how I would feel with my partner. I would be willing to hear what she had to say, but then I’d want to put in my two cents.
M: Well, what was great was it was a very small group at the time and there was only a handful of us. So, there was plenty of time to talk in dialogue. I could jump in and say, “Well, what about this? What about that?” I had space to have a voice.
But it wasn’t like I had the desire to sit in his seat. I had the desire to sit in my seat and join the conversation.
So, that’s the way it played out. At a certain point, way farther down the line when I kind of sensed that maybe—I can’t remember if I felt that I was soon to be in the teaching role that I am now, or maybe I was already in it and I would listen to him give talks. I would be thinking, “Why is he presenting it that way? Why wouldn’t he say this?” Even when that would come up, something in me would just be like, “You don’t know. Just wait and watch. Watch. See what happens.” Then I would see the wisdom at work in the approach that he used—even though it would be completely different than what I would use.
I always came back to—for whatever reason—”That person is in front of him right now.” When someone’s in front of me, then intelligence will move through me the way it moves through me. It’s not going to look like them. But for whatever reason, it all came together with he and that person, and that expression of point in his teaching. That’s the way it played out there. When it comes to somebody sitting in front of me, it’s going to be completely different.
TS: And then, in the midst of your everyday life as husband and wife, do you ever have the feeling of, “Oh my God! My spiritual teacher just did XYZ!” It’s one thing if your husband leaves dirty socks on the bed. But, “My spiritual teacher just did blah blah!”
M: I totally get the question. [The short answer is:] I don’t think I’ve had that. I think the reason why is because I had a sense of the true nature of what all of us are from very early on in my student role with him. Because I know that what we ultimately are isn’t defined by our human actions. I know that it can beautifully express through our human expression, but also know that sometimes there’s just that human experience that we’re having. Our spirit nature is not against that. It doesn’t make that wrong.
It’s kind of like earlier, when I was saying I couldn’t be angry at a person, even if I felt the energy of anger. It’s like that. It’s like I can see that Adya maybe has actions or does things that may not live up to somebody’s thinking idea about what enlightened activity is. At the same time, I know that that’s not what he is. It’s just that that’s what he does. Sometimes, what he does exhibits as fantastic—like I love it—and sometimes what he does doesn’t.
But I don’t see anything wrong with when it doesn’t. I just see it as another opportunity to see ever more clearly what’s happening—to see how I’m reacting to it or to see where it is that he’s speaking or moving from, and what’s happening. There’s a lot of good reasons to leave your socks around. You could just be exhausted or you could just feel more at home that way. You could just simply forget to pick them up, not realizing you left them there. It’s not necessarily that you’re just like, “Oh, I don’t give a shit about my wife liking to have a clean house.”
TS: Yes. Before we leave this, I guess my last question would just be: Has it felt to you that you’re in an “equal relationship?”
M: Yes. Yes.
I think that—perhaps at times—with him in my role as a teacher, I haven’t always thought that. At some level, I felt it. But it’s kind of similar to how I felt with my parents. There was times where I didn’t agree with what they were saying. I didn’t necessarily want to do what they were instructing me to do. But underneath it, I knew that I was 100 percent loved. So, in that sense, I knew that I was equal because they loved me as a whole person, just as I was.
It’s very similar with my relationship with Adya as a teacher. There is just that sense that, fundamentally, he and I both know that we’re not only equal, we’re the same. It’s not only that we’re the same—that we’re all the same.
So, that foundation is present, while on the surface sometimes he has more experience. And he has had a lot more experience in certain realms I’ve learned from. Some areas that I have more experience in, or more refined or developed expression in that he learns from me.
TS: OK, Mukti. So, the last thing I’d love us to cover is an actual experience of self-inquiry. What I noticed is that in your new series, The Self in Full Bloom: Teachings and Practices for an Embodied Awakening, the section in which you taught on self-inquiry was really, really useful to me. To be honest, I learned more about self-inquiry listening to you teach on it that I have in any other book or program I’ve ever been exposed to.
Often, when people talk about self-inquiry though, [it’s] like, “OK, inquire into the self. Who am I?” And for me, it falls flat. I’ve never really gotten a handle on it. So, I wonder if you could both introduce the practice and take us through an experience.
M: OK. So, just very quickly, there’s different kinds of inquiry that we call “self-inquiry”—kind of like how we were talking earlier. People use the term “awakening” in a lot of different ways. With self-inquiry, sometimes people are just questioning their thoughts that are causing them suffering. Or they’re becoming curious and kind of questioning an emotion that’s arising within them, and just kind of hanging out with what it’s about and what’s trying to express. [Or] what their missing experience was. Whatever it is.
And then there’s a kind of inquiry that I really feel is a true self-inquiry, which is inquiry that is questioning consciousness itself.
TS: Let’s go right for that one. Let’s go for that.
M: OK.
TS: Let’s do it.
M: So, what I’m speaking about is: Let’s just take some of the classical words that people have given to consciousness, or God or spirit. What’s the nature of that? Some of the classical things that are pointed to are stillness—like I’ve been talking about—or silence. Or unborn, undying, unconditioned, eternal. Ever-present. Things like that.
Or perhaps something that almost feels more like the senses—like receptive space or clear seeing, or stuff like that. Even though the essence of what we are is without quality until it’s conscious of its expressionist form, there’s still ways that, historically, consciousness or awareness has been given these kinds of attributes (like silence or stillness). Those attributes are great things to become curious about in self-inquiry.
So, like with myself, I asked the question, “What is stillness?” Yet, someone else might ask the question, “What is silence?”
Let’s say, for example, in the koan in Zen—you know, like, “When a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” That’s a really traditional Zen koan that’s pointing someone to explore what [it is] that expresses prior to sound, apart from sound. It’s pointing people to the formless. What is that [which] is prior to the form called sound?
It may not necessarily—on the part of the person doing the koan—they may not go that direction with it. But I’m just saying that all of these self-inquiry questions really are like in Zen. “What’s your true face before your parents were born?” They’re really pointing you back to the nature of spirit that’s eternal—that exists apart from the comings and goings of form, and the passing of experience.
I think that that’s really juicy self-inquiry—especially when it’s a question that somebody resonates with. Like, “What is the source?” You know—the source of anything. What is love’s source? What is this thought’s source? Meaning, where does this thought arise from? But I think it can be powerful to shape the question so that it ends with that word “source” so that it does drop you into the lake of your being and into that unknown—so that the revelation that comes can come from a true not-knowing. A person really needs to be completely open to the revelation for it to come. So, they have to step out of everything they know.
Those are great kinds of self-inquiry questions.
TS: Could you take us through an experience where the listener chooses a question and we go through how to practice self-inquiry together?
M: OK, sure. I’m going to say it a little bit differently, but I’m going to borrow one that I heard from Adya many, many years ago. It helped me so much because I had heard so much about this inquiry question, “Who or what am I?” I remember thinking, “Gosh! I don’t even have any interest in this question!” And partly, it was because whenever I asked it, I would go up into the databanks of my mind to try to find an answer.
But when he talked about that dropping [of] the pebble into the lake of being, that question—”What am I?”—began to take more life. In particular, I got the sense—whether he said it or not—that it would almost be more appropriate—I don’t think he said this; this was my sense—to reword the question and say, “What is ’I Am?’” Often, God or spirit has been called the “I Am.”
And so, that helped me take it out of this notion that the “I” had anything to do with “me” or had anything to do with the questioner—”me” as the one posing the question. The “I” that’s at the center of my experience right now.
It totally cleared the slate of my definitions of the word “I” and my connotations for that—by asking, “What is the ’I Am?’”
So, as an exercise, you can sit upright—or stand upright if you’re more comfortable. Energetically, to assist you in feeling more open and receptive, you can sit with your spine relatively straight and your chin just parallel with the floor—so that the flat of your head just opens. The crown of your head opens to the heavens.
There’s actually a channel of energy that comes down through the core of the body—down in front of the spine [and] all the way down into the earth. [It] connects and roots into the earth. So, if you sit with just the sense of this, it can be helpful initially just to establish that—that visual of opening to heaven and earth, and aligning with that connection.
Then, going back to Adya’s image of pretending you’re a lake—like a clear, still mountain lake. You’re going to drop—almost like you’re reaching your hand up toward the sky. Your hand is holding this pebble that’s imbued with the question. Then, you release. You just softly open your hands and you let the pebble fall down into the water. You let the question carry. And the question is, “What is, ’I Am?’”
Your awareness can just follow that. As it’s released, you can just release even the image of the pebble. You don’t have to keep following it with your attention. You can just transfer your attention into the ripple of the question that released. It just dissolved into the water and ripples through your being.
There may be a way in which you will feel a kind of opening of the body and the being as your attention just opens to merge with this question. If you’re drawn to let that sense of openness drop any further in your body—like, for example, from your chest down into your belly—you can also do that. Just let the sense of that opening ripple—the sense of, “I am.” Ripple through your whole being, above and below, through and through.
Any sense of yourself that might have expectation or be awaiting the answer—see if it’s possible for that energy of expectation to also let down and just join this rippling into being. Just joining this sense of, “I am.”
You’ll notice that the knowledge that you come to in true self-inquiry is not a knowledge that’s acquisition of thought. It’s a knowledge that’s a knowing of being. It’s a knowing of being.
TS: Thank you, Mukti.
M: You’re welcome. And thank you, too.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Mukti. With Sounds True, Mukti has recorded a new six-session audio series. It’s called The Self in Full Bloom: Teachings and Practices for an Embodied Awakening. It includes quite a bit of teaching on self-inquiry, [and] some really interesting and helpful insights on masculine and feminine expressions of awakening. So many discoveries, Mukti, on this whole topic of what is embodied awakening.
SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for being with us.
