Exhausted

"Q: I want what you wanted.

Adya: What did I want?

Q: You wanted to become enlightened.

Adya: I wanted to become enlightened. Ok. It didn’t work out.

Q: Did you at least become awake?

Adya: No. Awakeness became awake. Enlightenment becomes enlightened. The me, the little guy, little Steven Larry Gray, that meditated in his parent’s backyard for hours and hours a day, every single day, in the morning and the evening, and did nothing but do the good Buddhist thing, diligently, terribly, terribly disciplined, he didn’t get enlightened. He never made it. He never crossed the river of nirvana, it never happened to him.

What he did was, for whatever reason, maybe the seeking was necessary, is he got exhausted. It just completely exhausted itself. The little one that was trying to get awake and enlightened got so exhausted, so stricken by I can’t do this, I can’t, and I could no longer tell myself I can. That means the complete and utter destruction of denial. Because the denial is “I can”. And your experience keeps showing you “you can’t.”

And so I got so exhausted psychically, internally, emotionally, spiritually that I couldn’t keep it up anymore. And i had to see the truth. I was willing to see the truth only because I was exhausted. I can’t do it. And in that “I can’t do it,” and not as a spiritual strategy, emptiness woke up out of the seeker. The seeker didn’t wake up. Consciousness woke up from the seeker, from the personality, from the “me” that was trying so hard."

— Adyashanti