Adyashanti. Say It Soft and It's Almost Like Praying

Someone forwarded me part of an article recently and I found it interesting enough to look for the rest of it online. It's from Sun Magazine. There were parts that were interesting.

The role of the spiritual practice is basically to exhaust the seeker. If the practice does what it’s supposed to do, it exhausts our energy for seeking, and then reality has a chance to present itself. In that sense, spiritual practices can help lead to awakening. But that’s different from saying that the practice produces the awakening.

Hmmm.... well, that certainly fits what happened to me... so I kept reading...

Spiritual awakening doesn’t happen because you master some spiritual technique. There are lots of skillful meditators who are not awake. Awakening happens when you stop bullshitting yourself into continual nonawakening. It’s very easy to use disciplines to avoid reality rather than to encounter it. A true spirituality will have you continually facing your illusions and all the ways you avoid reality. Spiritual practice may be an important means of confronting yourself, or it may be a means of avoiding yourself; it all depends on your attitude and intention.

Then there was this part about the corruption of power:

There’s a lot of power inherent in enlightenment — or the perception of it — and spiritual power is no less corrupting than any other power. In fact, it may be even more corrupting.

I remember the first time I became conscious of this: I started teaching at thirty-three; most everybody was older than me, and more educated, and smarter. They had better jobs and all that. As I was driving home from teaching one night, it suddenly hit me: I could go in there and say almost anything and make them believe it. I saw, all at once, the incredible frailty of human beings. And I understood how intelligent, well-educated people can get involved in cults and the most ridiculous ideas: when we are in the grasp of ego, we’re extraordinarily vulnerable. As soon as I realized this, something else arose, which was this extraordinary distaste for it. That sort of power isn’t a pleasant thing to have. Now I look back at my teacher, Arvis Joen Justi, and see that her most important transmission to me was her integrity, because it gave me that distaste for power and influence. I can only guess that some people, even people with the best intentions, start to find that power enticing.

When you’re a spiritual teacher, you’re living in the projections of people around you. They have a tendency to see you as godlike, and that is not a healthy environment for anybody. But a spiritual teacher, by nature, has to exist in it. I’ve found that the more you try to correct this perception, the stronger it becomes. People just think you’re even better, because you’re not like all the teachers who are encouraging their students to see them as demigods. There’s no way around the projection game, and the potential is always there for it to corrode my integrity. I’m not immune to that. In fact, as soon as I conclude that I could never take advantage of people, it’s already started. It’s a subtle thing that can easily grow as time goes on, because there’s usually not someone around to say to the teacher, “Hey, this isn’t right.” Spiritual students are almost encouraged to think that because the teacher is an enlightened being, he or she knows everything. So people check their good sense at the door. What I tell people is that if you’re seeking enlightenment, your good sense is vital. In fact, you’re going to have to learn to trust it more and more. I think people actually know early on when something’s off about a teacher, but they think they must be wrong, because an enlightened person can’t do any wrong. And that’s not true. Enlightened people can do wrong. They can do harmful things. I think sometimes they don’t know it themselves.

My teacher told me, “There are lots of temptations out there. If you ever think you can’t handle those temptations, stop before you do something stupid.” That was a promise I made to her. We shouldn’t make the assumption that lust or greed or corruption could never emerge in us. It clearly can. Humility is always the best protection against being corrupted by power.

That section was when I thought this might be good for this site. And the single-most piece of advice he offers someone who wants to awaken?

Get in touch with what you really want. What does awakening mean for you? Do you want it because it sounds good? Then you’ve borrowed someone else’s idea of it. What is it that’s intrinsic to you? What’s been important to you your whole life? If you touch upon that, you are in touch with a force that no teacher or teaching could ever give you. You are quite on your own in finding it. No one can tell you what that is. Once you feel it, once you’re clear on it, everything else will unfold from there. If you need a teacher, you’ll find one. If you need a teaching, you’ll bump into it, probably in the most unexpected way.

Click the link to read the rest of the interview if you want. There are parts that are interesting although there were also parts for me that... well,... exhaust me still. :D So, enjoy.