Go to God Naked

"Spirituality may be approached in two ways. The first way is the most common, which is through a horizontal movement of the mind. Horizontal movement means the mind goes back and forth collecting information. It's as if the mind comes to a wall that has writing allover it. This wall has all kinds of teachings, practices, things to do, and things not to do. Usually the mind just makes a horizontal movement along the wall, acquiring and accumulating more information. It goes to the left side, and then it goes to the right side, collecting information, beliefs, theories, etc. Have you ever met people whose minds are like that? They have traversed way out to the nether reaches of the wall—the mind spinning horizontally collecting information. That's what the mind does, and most people make this horizontal movement of collecting information, ideas, beliefs, etc., in hopes that it will help them spiritually. But Truth isn't a matter of knowledge, it's a matter of waking up.
We do the same thing emotionally. We move horizontally along the wall collecting experiences. We have basic mundane human experiences, both good and bad, and then as we venture into spirituality we start having spiritual experiences. As with the mind, we start to think, "If I just accumulate enough experiences, then that will mean something. That will get me somewhere." It will get us more experiences, just as when the mind makes horizontal movements, it gets us more knowledge—not freedom, and not Truth. So the mind, the body, and the emotions play this game called accumulation. They evaluate one piece of conceptual knowledge against another piece of conceptual knowledge. "How does this piece compare to that one? And how does that compare to this?" We like to compare our experiences with others. "What have you experienced? Oh, I haven't experienced that, but I have experienced this; have you?" "This is what I believe; what do you believe?"
Then the emotional body asks, "Is this it? Is this the right experience? Am I having the experience? Why don't I have the experience?" The body-mind collects more things to do, more techniques, more this, more that.
The mind and body tend to follow old patterns, making horizontal movements, collecting facts, teachings, teachers, beliefs, and experiences. That's the predominant way most people live their lives—horizontally, not vertically. Then they bring that movement into their spiritual lives. But it doesn't matter how much horizontal accumulation of knowledge and experience you have; more information does not equal greater depth.
Now, in this moment, you can realize that you are truly not going to get anything from my words, that whatever your mind absorbs and accumulates as knowledge is not going to get you any more depth. None. Zero. Nothing. It will just get you more horizontal movement. It will just get you more knowledge. Maybe that's what you want, maybe not. But as soon as you realize the limitation of mind, the mind feels very disarmed because it has so much less to do. There is an invitation beyond the wall of knowledge, which is not to some regressive state before the mind can operate, but a transcendent state that's beyond where the mind can go. That's what spirituality is. It's going where the mind cannot go.
Try imagining you come up to a wall. There happens to be a door in it. You open the door and walk through the wall. Now to get any more depth, you are going to have to leave the wall behind. If you reach back and hold the wall with one of your hands and try to get your feet to walk, you are not going to get very far. So when you really want to get depth, transcendent depth, you are faced with whether or not to let go of the mind. What the mind says is, "I'll let go a little bit, but I'll stuff a lot of that knowledge in my pocket for the journey. I might need my concepts somewhere along the line." It will start to ask lots of questions. "Is this safe? Is this wise? Am I going to be stupid?" As if all wisdom is contained in the collection of knowledge. Mentally, psychologically, people tend to get very insecure when they go completely past their accumulation of knowledge.
The mind can't fathom that there can be a true intelligence, a transcendent intelligence, that isn't the product and outcome of thought and conceptual understanding. It can't fathom that there could be wisdom that's not going to come at you in the form of thoughts, in the form of acquired and accumulated knowledge.
The true spiritual urge or yearning is always an invitation beyond the mind. That's why it's always been said that if you go to God, you go naked or you don't go at all. It's the same for everybody. You go in free of your accumulated knowledge, or you are forever unable to enter. So an intelligent mind realizes its own limitation, and it's a beautiful thing when it does.
When you stop holding on to all of the knowledge, then you start to enter a different state of being. You start to move into a different dimension. You move into a dimension where experience inside gets very quiet. The mind may still be there chatting in the background, or it might not, but consciousness is no longer bothering itself with the mind. You don't need to stop it. Your awareness just goes right past that wall of knowledge and moves into a very quiet state.
In this quietness, you realize that you don't know anything simply because you aren't looking back to the mind for its acquired knowledge. This quietness is a mystery to the mind. It is something unknown. As you go into depth, you literally go into a deeper experience of what seems to be a great mystery. Now the mind might come in and want to know what's going on and start to define everything, but that's not going to bring any more depth. The mystery just keeps opening to itself if you let it—if you let go of control.
As acquired knowledge is left behind, what is found is that you have left your familiar sense of self behind. That self only existed in the accumulation of knowledge and experience. Something very interesting happens when you leave it all behind, because you are literally leaving your memory behind. You leave behind who you thought you were, whoever you thought your parents were, and everything else you thought and believed. Yesterday is gone. Then a very interesting thing starts to be noticed: you can leave all of that behind and still you are—you are right here and right now. So what you are becomes even more mysterious.
When you realize that you can leave every self-definition behind and still you are, then you begin to see that these thoughts must not be what you are. In other words, who are you when you are not thinking yourself into existence? Who are you when you give up all thoughts, even the ones that you are not supposed to question, such as, "I am a human being. I am a woman or I am a man. I am somebody’s daughter or son." You start to see that when you are not thinking yourself into existence, who you have taken yourself to be literally isn't there anymore. If this "you" can disappear like that and reappear as soon as you think it into existence, how real is it?
In that moment of recognition, you have already begun to move beyond the wall of accumulated knowledge. Then, if you don't redefine this moment or rebox it in some concept, rethinking yourself into existence, your true state of being starts to present itself What you really are begins to awaken. The true I am is so unbelievably empty. It's so free of everything you thought you were. It has no limitation. It has no definition. Any definition would be a disservice to what you are. All that's left is consciousness, and it's not even that because that's just a word.
When you see what you really are, no concepts apply anymore. You are so empty there is just consciousness. There is no inner child, and there is no adult either. None of your identities exist until you think them into existence. Consciousness can look down and see there is a body, but that's not the source of anyone's problem. The problem is what you add on after that in your mind.
In this emptiness you start to taste the experience of being. This is being before you are something or somebody. And this mystery of being is what's awake and alive. It is the only thing that doesn't need the mind to conjure it into existence. You don't have to think at all to be this awakeness. Everything about you changes except this one fact of consciousness. The body changes. The mind changes. Thoughts change—much more quickly than most people would like them to. And no matter how much knowledge you acquire, that knowledge is not going to get you here any faster. Being is the one constant—that which is always awake."
-- Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing
Art - "Owl Ceremony-HE
masked HE as the starry realm…
in ceremony with and as the owl…
the stars do shoot across the sky
heaven…it is known…
Owl does speak the voice of the heaven
world in this painting. Wisdom in the
night. And man does Know."
-- Mary Saint-Marie