Adyashanti on Living in the Service of Truth

June twenty nine all around the world. In order to be part of it, you don't have to make up commitment at this point, but if you register, we know where you are, and if enough people in any given place register, then we have enough people and we will schedule a meet up for you all. So the more people who register, the greater probability of a meet up taking place in your area. So you can go to one you feed dot net slash meet up to sign

up for this gathering. You'll need to do it by June twenty two and today June and again go to one you feed dot net slash meet up to register your interest. I sincerely hope we have lots of people participating in this giving you a chance to meet each other. It's a when you feed dot net slash meet up. Thanks human beings, we don't seem to do well if we're living life exclusively for ourselves. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance

of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Audi A Shanty. This is actually his third time on the podcast, so he's a member of an

elite club there. He's an American born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings, and his teachings are an open invitation to stop, inquire and recognize what is true in liberating at the core of all existence. Audio Shanty also runs the Omega Retreat, which Eric has taken part in frequently. Hi, Idea, Welcome to the show. Thanks Eric. This is our third time to sit down, so I don't know. I think there's been one other guest who's been on three times. So you are in

elite company, is that right? Yes? Yes, So it's always fun to do and we are in person, which always makes it even more fun for me. So many of them we I do remote, so I of when I could do him in person. So thank you. Some of what we're gonna talk about is your most recent book, the most Important Thing, Discovering Truth at the heart of Life. But before that, you're going to get a chance to respond for the third time to the wolf. Parable Uh.

There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the others a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and

he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed so I'd like to kind of ask you, like I said, for the third time, and I don't know what you said the first two times, so have had it. I don't know either, which is probably a good thing. It's an interesting question, you know, because it's it's like one of those parables that, on the face of it seems pretty simple and straightforward. And I think anybody that's halfway conscious, um, knows exactly what

you're referring to in that parable, right, um. And yet it also seems to have this portal into something that's really quite quite deep and universal for us all um. And the thing that comes to mind when you were telling me that parable again, is that, you know, is that actually like it's the same wolf, right, the good wolf and the bad wolf is the same wolf. Right. It's it's all part of our part of our psyche.

And I do think that, Um. Mostly, I think we feed with our sort of attention and intention I think are undervalued things in human life, you know, just our mere attention, like where are we giving our attention to? But also our intention And I've focused a lot a lot more on that in the last few years of uh. The way I like to try to approach. It is when we all look at our or whatever our deeper, more meaningful experiences in life have been. You know, Um,

they could be revelatory moments or whatever. It could be the birth of a child, or falling in love, or a spiritual awakening or all sorts of different experiences. But I think that this kind of gets back into that, this sort of wolf parable analogy is when we touch upon our depth, I think we can, we can sort of we have a certain experience. Sometimes certain insights come

come from that. But what the thing that we don't often do, which gets back to intention, is looking and reassess and go from that perspective, from the perspective of whatever has been my more some of my more meaningful or insightful experiences in my life, what becomes truly important you know, and then important in the sense from the inside out rather than from the outside in. And I think that's a way of connecting with our truer nature, right with the more benevolent way of being um inside

of us. And but to see it not just as an experience or something that feels good or feels meaningful, but really it's it's sort of more, there's a more challenging way I think to look at it, which which when we look from our depth, goes how does that experience prioritize our life? In other words, what becomes meaningful, what becomes worthwhile orienting my life around That's kind of how I look at it now, and I think that's a way of orienting it around that benevolent and wise

sort of light within ourselves. But like I said, I think it's also the same wolf, even though it has these two aspects, right, It's the same self, same psyche that experiences both our light and our darkness. Um And yet I think, especially as I get older. You know, I'm fifty six now, and I think one of the things as you get older, as you age more certainly in my case, you just become more and more willing

to experience the entirety of of your being. And I think part of it is you get encountered with things that we try not to encounter early, like limitation, like human flaw, human fallibility, you know, all those parts. And even from aging level, you know, we're not in the upward curve of our strength and endurance and even our cognitive capacity, but we're in a different dimension of of

our life. And even though I don't associate that with like darkness or anything like that, um, I think there is an encounter with limitation that we don't usually see as sort of the light, bright, shiny, you know, wisdom part of us that, But there is a profound kind of wisdom that comes with a kind of confrontation with limitation or even with sometimes some of the dark spaces inside. Yeah. We did an interview with a guy named Jonathan Rouch.

He works for the Brookings Institutes. Books is called the I think it's called the Happiness curve if I recall, and he basically says that if you look at again, this is demographically every your individual experience might be different that you see happiness start off as you're younger up here, and then it sort of plummets down and sort of bottoms out in what we might consider middle aged late forties,

and then it starts to actually go back up. You know, you actually start to get better, and I think it flips that narrative on its head of oh, your later lives are going to be unhappy. You do to your point, you do have this recognition of limitation, and you realize all the things that you might not accomplish in life that you thought what you were you were going to do and yet looked at in the in a certain way. We can become happier, more contented, deeper people as we

age if we allow that. Yeah, I think, and I think that the definitions of sort of what we even think of as happiness is changes. So like, for instance, now kind of going back to what you're speaking about, is to me, the when we're young happiness is well, it's the sort of the conventional idea of happiness. You know, it's associated with of innocence and potentiality and like that

upward curve of life and all of that. And I think there's as we mature, whether it's physically or spiritually, that happiness becomes more a outcome of wholeness, that we're actually becoming whole beings. And again to kind of tie into that the parable of the two wolves, like that there's a different kind of happiness when we start to open to the through this sort of greater sense of

whole wholeness of being um. And I think that that's in one sense, that's why that arc of well being maybe that's even the better word well being or something like that than conventional happiness comes online, because I think we start to have a bigger capacity for our own wholeness.

I remember my mom when she was trying to think of the age she started to talk to me about this, but certainly in her sixties, and you know, she says, well, basically, you know, my life didn't unfall as I thought it would. None of my kids ended up to be who I thought they would be. All the things that I thought I had figured out about life, I realized I didn't

have like figured out about life. And maybe that's part of that dip of middle life, when you start to come into a recognition of of you know, life as it is, rather than the image of life. But then there's the flip side of that, where she said, it's actually it's it's better like my kids ended up to be better than I hope like my there's my life didn't end up to be the way that I saw it being, but it seems to be getting better and

better and better. And um, I think there's that confrontation with just the reality of life that flips the equation. I've seen as a spiritual teacher that generally a lot of times the people that are the most unhappy are

the people that are seeking happiness the most. Well, in one sense, that's obvious, like if you're unhappy, of course you want to be happy, right, But I think there's also a less conventional way of looking at that that's maybe just as true, which is especially in our culture where we tend to be focused so much on happiness. Everybody's trying to be bright and shiny and happy and

successful in all these things. And and I think that's sort of a misunderstanding about what real happiness is, um And I think happiness isn't even a great goal to shoot for, Like we all want to be happy sort of in eights in our d n A. But I think the most contented people seem to be the people that have tapped into their life being an experience of

something that's really meaningful to them. You know, I think if we shoot for meaning rather than just happiness, we end up being a whole lot more happy in the end. And I don't necessarily mean like a meaning that you could philosophically write down in your notebook and show your friend, but I mean, you know, we all know the experience.

You're a parent, right, So I imagine the experience of seeing your child for the first time, probably a happy, joyous, mind blowing moment, but I imagine that moment had a kind of depth of meaning that it's probably hard for you to even try to articulate to me, Right, is that? Yeah?

Oh yeah, And that's kind of what I mean. I think there's happiness and well being flow out of meaning, but a kind of meaning that's not always easy to articulate because I think meaning is fundamentally an experience of being. It's not something you can actually necessarily explain to somebody. Right.

That leads me into your book is called The Most Important Thing, Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life, your latest book, and you say, the questions we ask are so incredibly important, And one of the questions that you ask is what am I in service to? You say, it's an awakener, it's an awareness practice and an honesty practice. Yeah. I think it kind of comes back through the idea of meaning and and well being. And I think meaning

comes out of what we're in service to. Happiness, deeper happiness comes out of what we're in service to human beings. We don't seem to do well if we're living life exclusively for ourselves, right, doesn't just doesn't seem to make us happy, And yet we seem to be inclined to try absolutely and at a certain point in our life maybe that's just developmentally reasonable, Like you know, when we're

quite young. But as we get as we get a little older, a little older would be by our late teens or early twenties, I'm not talking like you know, old age, but we start to we start to have this this turning and and start to realize that the pursuit of just the pursuit of happiness for ourself doesn't end up making us happy. Self centeredness just isn't a very happy way to go through life. I remember years ago when I did UM, a weekend intensive. It was really a learning experience for me and I as a

subject matter. I called the whole weekend UM servants of Truth, and the idea was, what does it mean to actually serve what you yourself realize rather than trying to get more realization and how do I hold onto it and how do I have more experience? And this sort of acquisition orientation towards spirituality and spiritual experience instead look at whatever our more meaningful experiences of being and start to act ask ourselves like how could I be in in

a deeper service to this? And it really showed me something because I got about half the people on that intensive that I normally get, which is interesting you know as a teacher, like you know, you learn a lot

from your students. Um, And it really showed me. But that that weekend, which is going back probably twelve or fifteen years ago, now that what I took out of it is adia you're not getting something across is if this is how the people are responding to this idea, this is an idea you've got to articulate better than you have because of being the serve If the word servant to something just scares people off or makes them uninteresting, like that told me as a teacher, I've got to

be I've got to start to articulate this in a in a better way. UM. So people really start to realize number one, what I'm talking about, and UM, I think that what the foundation of both human and spiritual maturity really is. You tell a story of your first teacher and this idea of service, about how she started teaching and would show up each week right a Dharma talk show up to meditate, and oftentimes there was nobody there. Nobody came for a for a for an entire year. Yeah,

tell me more about not a single person. And yet she and this, you know, she did this in her house. So she reorganized the whole living room, put out all the meditation cushions. It was no small thing. And then after a year, one person showed up and they sat together for a year until a few more and then

a few more started to show up. But it was a real remember when her teaching telling me about that story, worry and kind of as a dovetail to that, if I sort of fast forward many years after she asked me to teach, and not long after she asked me to teach, they found out she had a sort of sheet will number one. She just hadn't planned on it been intuitively, she just knew it was time to stop teaching,

and so Jesus stopped. She didn't even know why. Well then six months of that, so this is about a year now after she had asked me to teach, um, they found she had a brain tumor um, which fortunately was was not cancer. And but they had to operate, and you know that all the complications of brain surgery unfolded. But and then when she started to recover from that,

she used to come into the office. It wasn't this office that we have now, but not too far from here, when we were much smaller, and she said, I want to come help you guys out and I said, okay, come on in, we'll see what we have to do. And one day I walked in the door and there she was sitting at a desk and it was back when they were like tapes before CDs and stuff, and she was putting, you know, the decal on the tape where you could write the name of it and stuff

like that. And I remember walking in the door and I saw her doing that, and and for me, in one way, that was one of the the most profound teaching moments that I had from her, of just seeing that she had always talked about serving the Dharma and I was there there she had been for over thirty years, like the teacher, and that was her way of serving the Dharma. And then when she could no longer do that.

Now it's putting labels on tapes in the office and seeing that as serving the dharma for her previous student, for her previous student and the humility and the and the sense of service, and that just touched me some much, you know, I just thought, Wow, like that service beyond who you are or or how you can be seen or your position or whatever, that's just serving what's valuable to you in life. Yea. And that taught me a lot. Yeah, and that story you you go on after it to

sort of say something. And I've noticed this a lot also in working with people, is that we tend to have this idea that if we're going to be of service or we're going to do something good for the world, it's become so inflated with being seen, with being noticed, or even if it's not that, even if the motivation still is, you know, if we've managed to sort of keep ego out of it, it still seems like if it's not on big scale, we feel like it's not important.

And I feel like that's a place that a lot of people get lost and feel that life isn't it's not as important as it could because I'm doing this little thing, you know. And I think we sell ourselves short of the good work that we do do in life by not appreciating it because thinking it has to

be grand for it to matter. Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Eric, I really do, because well, because the former of what you just mentioned can kind of be a sort of a sort of concealed ego orientation. Right unless it has huge impact or I'm seeing or I'm noticed or something, I don't have much motivation for it. Um where Really, I think the service to whatever we

hold valuable is like each moment of life. It's a life orientation that really doesn't have anything to do with how big the scale is or how how much it is known, or that's what I got from It's from seeing my teacher, you know, with those tapes. It was like that service. She's serving what's valuable to her. She's giving her life, her energy or commitment is actually to

serving the dharma. And it doesn't make any difference how that scene, if it's on a big scale and a small scale, whether it's noticed or not noticed, it's just getting down. Like let's say I could go out and have interviews like this or get big talks or do retreats or whatever, and then I'm like sitting in a line in a bank and somebody behind me is having a tough time. But I don't want to be bothered,

you know, like all of a sudden. You know, for me, if I didn't step up to that moment and acknowledge that person or to see what their need was at that moment, the whole rest of my life would just seem like a total charade, you know what I mean? Yeah, it See, it's kind of easy to be noble when you're up, when you're noticed, when people notice, But think

most of our lives is not. That's not where it takes place, right right, So even when I'm like, I like, I'll be going to a retreat right and I'll be teaching, but I'm actually teaching for maybe four hours during those days, which means there's twenty other hours. I think the twenty other hours are just as important and maybe even more important than the four. Those are all a little small moments,

you know, where it makes a difference. Um, Because really, I mean, how much have you and I and all of us in our in our lives had those moments where somebody just gave us what I call our two most prized commodities a little time and attention when we needed it, and it wasn't known, and it wasn't on a stage, and it wasn't It wasn't for any other reason than somebody saw that we need a little time and attention and when somebody gave it to us. I think most of us have all had those moments, and

those can be very transformative moments. They're small, at least from the exterior, but um so I think that's a really really important part because we can't get hung up like I don't want to do this unless I can change the world. Well, she's how big an ego is that. You know, we were talking about kids earlier, like I often about like parents. I mean, there's so much service embedded in that, and yet often as parents we don't even reflect on that that is a noble and a

beautiful thing to do. Like I often think as a parent, you're like, all I'm doing is taking care of my kids all day long. And look this guy's over there giving uh, you know, starting this clean water project. And we we sell ourselves short about what we could feel positive about if we looked and went, wait, my life is about service. I am serving And can I reorient my expectation of myself? Yeah? Through teaching, I have come to see how unimaginably really unimaginable. And I don't say

that as an overstatement. Maybe it's an understatement how unimaginally important parenting is because I see the fallout of bad parenting or just parentings that just you know, there's no there's general Most people don't go to a parenting class like they're doing the best they can, but it may

not actually be that great. Um. And I I think personally, even though I don't have kids, but I think the role of parenting is probably the most noble calling that anybody could have, right because that man, you want to have impact. Um, parenting is your place where you you may have more impact than anything else you do, because it's going to affect that person's life and their children.

There's children's children, and it's gonna go on for generations. Yeah. Really, I think it's it's I just think it's huge, and most of it's done behind the scenes where there's no fanfare, and you know, sometimes it's beautiful and lovely, and sometimes

it's extraordinarily challenging. It seems to me. Um. As my mother said to me many years ago, you know that the first five years I almost killed her because I was such a difficult kid, you know, not and ill tempered kid, but just I just she just couldn't turn her back on me, because you never know the next dangerous thing I would be getting into um and anyway, So I just think things like that parenting. It's not just parenting, but I think that's a really good example

of of profound service. And it's easy to imagine. I can only imagine as a parent at any moment during the day, when there's you know, all sorts of challenges at any given day, that it's not easy to keep a living sense of of how desperately important that is and how much you are in service to the whole world. Yep, I think it's so easy to lose sight of. And

I think it's very easy. What I'll hear, you know, people I work with in in my one on one work will be you know, I'm not doing anything important in the world. I'm like, hang on, slow, your role, hold on. Actually, you're doing something tremendously important, right, you know. And And and to feel that if we're not doing something that's big, we're not doing something important, is a we make ourselves feel bad about ourselves in a way

that is truly unnecessary. I think so too, And I think it's the consequence of something that was necessary, um culturally and developmentally. I think it was necessary that, you know, because you can get sort of a lot lost in parenting and sort of lose your inner life in a certain sense, you know, through just trying to do the right things and be the right person to do all

this kind of stuff. And of course, generations thousands of years of women that couldn't felt like they couldn't fulfill their potential in other ways in life beyond parenting, and so all those you know, for all those reasons and many more, are you know this, This pressure came societally to start to change that, you know, to to to let people realize they can develop lives beyond and outside

of their parenting roles. And so okay, that really needed to happen, right, especially for women, that really needed to happen, and that transformation needed to come. And I think what often happens is we can kind of throw out the baby with the bath water in a certain sense in that, yeah, we we want to be able to exercise our talents beyond the particular let's say parenting roles or family roles. We play, we let in life, and we want to

be able to do that. But I think what we've lost in there is exactly what you were just mentioning that, Yeah, we all we do want to be able to flourish

in in other ways. But man, don't forget that that that that parenting role, the immensity of the importance of that is, and what an incredible service that is, and it's and and a sacrifice, even though it seems to me that parents get so so much from being a parent, but it's it's it's no walk in the park every day, right, But so I think we've kind of lost a little bit of touch with valuing how important that actually is. That's a good point though, about how where we how

we got where we are. I think it's really true. Yeah, I mean it's almost always goes that way. We kind of to find balance. We go from one out of balanced state to a little bit out of balance state before we find something that's that's a little more wise.

So I want to talk now about this idea that you talk about in the book, and you say there's no direct causal relationship between our spiritual pursuits and the arising of self recognition or of spiritual awakening, So sort of saying you can't make yourself awaken and yet so there's no wreck causal relationship. But you also say it's a mistake to assume that what we do doesn't have an impact. So talk to me about that, that dichotomy

or that paradox. Yeah, well it kind of goes goes into this sort of human way that we tend to think, which is in either or categories. Right, And this is like a really great example of thinking in either or either either my spiritual say practice, what do I what I do to try to awaken or connect with the divine or something? Um, either that has a direct causal

relationship to revelation or it doesn't. But if we kind of like back up from that and say life doesn't usually go in according to these these black and white ways of unfolding, um that yeah, we can't. We can't you know, have this recipe where I do this, this and this and this and I can guarantee that it equals spiritual awakening. Right, It just doesn't seem to work

that way. Hell, if it did, we would have figured out a long time ago what the three steps or the ten steps are the two steps that you know, and and yet it just doesn't sort of. But so then people will conclude, well, then it has no no, there is no causal relationship. I think the causal relationship is there. It's just not direct. It's indirect. It's in the sense of, well, to go back to parenting, right, you can't cause your kids to be exactly what you think you want them to be or should be, or

or guide them or you know what I mean. You can do the same thing that another parent does and have a very very different result. But there are ten hundreds of thousands of indirect causal relationships that are having a are setting to states there there are are having an effect. It's just not it's just not like mathematics. It's not like two and two equals four sometimes two and two equals six or five or seven or but it's also not chaotic. It's not simply chance. You know.

That's there's no mistake that most people that have say spiritual awakening, not all, but I would say, in my experience, in excess of we're doing something specific in their pursuit of that. And I think we'll explore this more in Part two about how our spiritual practice, if we're not careful, becomes about the result. Right, we do it because we expect or we want this thing to happen, and and that very mentality often stands directly in the way. So

the thing, where's the paradox of spiritual practice itself? Right? That it can It can open doors, and it can also close doors, and often it does that both of those things at the same time. Sometimes. Um. Again, I think a lot of this goes back to the ways

that we compartmentalize all this stuff. The way I see it now is um, the very impetus that gets someone to do any kind of spiritual practice, that gets into open a spiritual book or go to a talk, or look on the internet or you know, like why are you doing that? And your friends could care less where

did that come from? In your in your life? And what I would say is that the impulse, let's say for enlightenment, big word, but we'll just the impulse for enlightenment is you have the impulse because the impulse is the first arising of the enlightenment, arising in your consciousness. That the interest itself is a sign that there's a

spiritual maturity that's already arising into consciousness. That's a very different way of looking at all this, because usually we look good it is I want to awaken, right or I want enlightenment or something because I because it's not here, because I don't experience it. What I'm saying is that you're very desire for it is actually only there because that impulses already starting to flower in your life, maybe

not to the extent that you would like. Right, doesn't mean you just get to sit back and wait for it all to happen, But um, the yearning itself is sort of coming from the thing we're yearning for. That can be a more useful way to look at it because it keeps us out of this either or way of relating to to our spirituality or approach our practice,

whatever that might be. You know, And then I remember hearing about some of this stuff just years before I had any understanding of it, Like your practice is an expression of enlightenment itself, and I'd be sitting there meditating, going that sounds kind of profound, although confusing, but it certainly doesn't seem to be what I'm experiencing, Like my practice doesn't feel like enlightenment at all, right, at that

time the circus is here. It's yeah, yeah, I can see like a chaotic circus, right, a bad circus is coming to town. But in retrospect, which is often where we are all the most wise, right in retrospects, you look back, and now I can clearly see that the even that that sort of chaotic impulse for awakening was there because the because in essence awakening was already in process. It hadn't bloomed to the sense that I was conscious of it. You know, I was at that time still

kind of confused and blindly groping in the dark. But even the impulse to do that is coming from the thing that we're seeking. We think it's coming from the last of what we're sinking, rather than the presence of what we're seeking is already starting to arise into our consciousness.

And you know, if we're if we're ready for it, that can kind of put a little bit different twist, you know, that we can we can start to maybe just a little bit start to appreciate within the impulse to awaken itself is is a bit of the awakened mind. We only feel that because awakened mind is already starting to sort of break through just a bit into consciousness.

And if we even if we take that as a on a conceptual level for a little bit, that perhaps it allows one to kind of relax, relax into their practice rather than because spiritual practice so easily becomes a sort of institutionalized seeking, right, you know, my practice is is nothing but spiritual seeking. And that's when it becomes a barrier, you know. Um, that's when it starts to get in the way because it's an unconscious denial of

of true nature. We don't know it at the time, but that's kind of what it is, right, and that is what we will explore in part two. All right, so thank you so much for coming on for part one here. It's nice to be with you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to The One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.