Daily Dedroidify: Adyashanti

Daily Dedroidify: Adyashanti

Born as Steven Gray, Adyashanti studied Zen for 14 years under the guidance of his Zen teacher Arvis Joen Justi. Arvis was a student of Taizan Maezumi Roshi of the Zen Center of Los Angeles before he requested that she teach. Adyashanti was regularly sent by Arvis to Zen sesshins, where he also studied under Jakusho Kwong Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center.

At age 25 he began experiencing a series of transformative spiritual awakenings and eventually Bodhi, better known as enlightenment in the west. His teachings and basic world view suggest nondualism and thus teaches the liberation of beings from the illusion of separation, also known as maya (illusion). This is a classic eastern ideology familiar to both Buddhism and Hinduism.

The basic concept of this ideology is that humans tend to identify with a sense of self that is essentially not real, or sometimes called empty. The Buddha called this idea no-self, or anatta. Suffering is thus said to be caused by the belief in a separate self that seems to be divided from the world. If someone was to realize that they, as an individually isolated self, was not real, but that there is only one being, known as Buddha-nature in Buddhism or Brahman in Advaita Vedanta, then they would be awakened to the true nature of their being, oneness. To have such an awakening is to realize that there is no me and no other, there is only one. One being, one universe, one everything. Suffering, however, does not necessarily end here. After an awakening it is suggested that there is often a long process of embodiment where the old beliefs of the body and mind, sometimes called samskaras, gradually yield to the new understanding of one's true nature. Spontaneous Awakening and Falling Away are two great audiobooks I recommend.


Adyashanti: What is Enlightenment?

Adyashanti Quotes
"...In the end spirituality is not about watching the breath. It's about waking up from the dream of separateness to the truth of unity."

"There is only life living itself, life seeing itself, life hearing itself, life meeting itself as each moment."

"The proof that there was something wrong was that I wasn't spiritually awakened. If there was nothing wrong then I would be spiritually awakened... Little did I know that the whole sense that there was something wrong was being totally grasped by the clutches of ego, that was ego. There was somehow something deficient, that idea itself was ego and had led to innumerable egoic episodes. Egocentered narratives in the novel of my life. Even with the sense of neutrality there was this unconscious thread that there was something wrong... And if there's a definition of ego, there's one definition of ego that has some real truth to it, it is: there's something wrong...
I'm not awake, I'm not spiritually enlightened, because there's something wrong. if there wasn't something wrong I would be enlightened you see. So this idea, this felt experience, actually is a big part of what ego is you see. Cause if there's nothing wrong, all the self-contradiction just falls away. Which is of course what it does when we awaken to our true nature. And we see from the eyes of spirit rather than from the eyes of mind. From the eyes of spirit there is nothing wrong. There is nothing wrong with you, with them. This was quite a surprise, there was actually nothing wrong." (Falling Away)

Links
Adyashanti
Adyashanti wikipedia
Writings - Audio - Video
Adyashanti GV