Face Life

“Life is where the spiritual rubber hits the road. Life will show us where we are not clear. Being in relationship with life and others shows us clearly where we can still get hung up. If we have true sincerity, we are not going to hide in the realization of the absolute. We are going to come out of hiding. We are not going to grab on to anything.

What I’m getting at is that it is totally natural to seemingly be awake one moment and then seemingly be asleep the next. It is natural to feel like you have lost some of the realization you had last week or last month or last year. The most important thing is to know that it is natural. Nothing has gone wrong; everything has just gone to a deeper level. Your entire system is being dredged clean in a deeper way. You are now capable of seeing yourself in a clearer light, and you are capable of seeing your tendency to go into separation in a more vivid way. You are seeing things that were unconscious before. They drove you, without you having any real understanding of what was going on. But now you can start to see what was not conscious before. This allowing everything to become more and more conscious is a big part of the process that occurs after awakening…

We need to want the truth even more than we want to experience the truth. This sincerity isn’t something we can impose; it’s inherent within reality itself.

This type of radical sincerity may be hard to uncover for some people. It can come as quite a surprise that we can have an amazing glimpse of the true nature of things, and then come back into the gravitational field of duality and find the body and mind still horrendously conflicted. This can be very surprising, not only for the people it’s happening within, but for those around them. One minute, such a person could be extraordinarily wise, and the next minute he or she might be extraordinarily deluded. This isn’t only confusing to the person; it’s confusing to everybody around him or her.

In fact, this causes come people to doubt the nature of awakening itself. Somebody has a great awakening experience but is still sort of a jerk. Who cares about awakening, then? While understandable, that conclusion can only be made by someone who does not fully understand the process of awakening. The fact is, we can have a very deep seeing of the true nature of things, while remaining, on the human level, very conflicted and deluded in certain areas of our lives. We need the sincerity to stop shying away from that, to actually turn, look, and face any place where we perceive something less than awakenedness, something less than unity. When we perceive divisiveness in ourselves, we must face it.”

~ Adyashanti, The End of Your World

Top Photo ~ Kevin Richardson, known as "The Lion Whisperer", is a South African animal behaviourist who has worked extensively with native animals of Africa.