Adyashanti on the Process and Experience of Awakening (part 1)

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 m thanks for joining us our guest on this episode. For the second time in history, I believe Audi a shanty. The guest was

the hundred and sixty six episode that we did. Uh. He's the author of the Way of Liberation, Falling into Grace, True Meditation, and the end of your World. Audio Shanty is an American born spiritual teacher devoted to serving the awakening of all beings. His teachings are an open invitation to stop, enquire, and recognize what is true and liberating at the core of all existence. Audio Shanty also runs the Omega Retreat, which Eric our own the One You

Feed podcast. Eric has taken part in and before we get started, we really want to get to know you guys better. So the One You Feed podcast is competing with other shows to get the most responses to a quick survey. It only takes a few minutes literally of your time, and you can do it straight from a smartphone. So please help us out and support the show by going to Wondering dot com slash survey and filling it out. That's wonder e w O N D e r y dot com slash survey as usual. Thanks for all of

your support. Hi Addio, Welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, Nice to be back with you again. I'm really excited to have you on a second time, and to be able to actually do it both times in person has been wonderful. I don't get that opportunity a ton with people, so but our first interview went so well, so many people loved it that, you know, I was really excited to get to do this again, and we talked about we'll make this a two parters, so great, thank you. I'm happy to kind of put it onto the end

of the last one we did, which is so wonderful. Yeah, so it's kind of nice we get it chance to kind of tie up all the loose ins. Yep. So I don't think I'm going to do the wolf parable like we normally do. Um, you talk through that once, but I want to start off by telling you a little bit about an experience I had with you and then kind of go into questions from there. So, UM, I attended your Omega retreat this last year and it

was wonderful in a lot of different ways. And I had a period of time there where I had what I think we would typically refer to as an awakening. I sort of became one with everything for three or

four hours. So really remarkable experience. I want to talk with you a little bit about where do people go from there, and I want to talk a little bit about that was an experience, and I don't think an experience is what we're chasing, and I know even chasing anything is problematic, but I want to I want to talk a little bit about what the realized or awakened state in perpetuity is like versus that moment of awakening, which had a high degree of ecstasy, which I don't

think is what we're talking about here long term, not in the long term, no, because so much of the not all of it, but so much of the ecstasy is the ecstasy of sort of first discovery, and that's that's beautiful. You know, you only get one first discovery of anything, and so a lot of it is is just that the sort of I call it kind of byproduct of having a perceptual shift, which when you were when you just very briefly described it to me, you decaid I was at one with everything. So that tells

me something as a teacher, really important. That tells me that you you had a shift of perspective which gave rise to experience rather than an experience simply an experience. That's the kind of the one of the main differences between something that we might call awakening would be has to always involve some real shift of perception, got it,

Not any old shift of perception, but yet very least. Yeah, I think a lot of the ecstasy for me was the phrase that kept going through my head was thank God, that's over, like just the burden of carrying myself. And you know that has ebbed and flowed since then, and I you know, it's been difficult to stay in anything. And again, not even the ecstasy, but just to stay

in that in that place. But it was interesting. I came back and all of a sudden, a lot of things that I had been doing just didn't interest me. An example would be I had been, um, someone had talked about writing a book for the show, and I had been working on that. When I came back, I went, that's not a priority for me right now, because I realized that, at least to some degree, that was driven by my desire to be an author. Now I've come back around to that and I think I'm approaching it

from a different place. But it was just it was a fascinating experience. So in fact, I think a lot of the most fascinating fascinating parts of that kind of experience are actually more of what what falls away, Yeah, and then what appear, what appears like the unity and stuff can be can be wonderful, But it is really interesting of that you see almost in retrospect what you were doing that was more self oriented or motivated. And so when that gets to be seen through those whatever

was self motivated takes a hit. You can, like you said, you can, you can decide discover a new motivation that may not be so self motivating oriented. But yeah, I walked out wondering do I want to do this show? I mean, and and that didn't last very long because I think I've been able to keep my motivation enough of my motivation about the benefit it brings to myself psychle logically and spiritually and and other people. But it

caused me to think about it differently. So one of the things I'm interested in is you've talked about this. Everybody talks about this paradox of I really want to awaken, but really wanting something seems to stand right in the way of awakening. I mean, my experience of awakening there happened when I I don't know how I did it, but I truly said, whatever, I'm gonna let everything be exactly as it is. I had been fighting sleeping, I had been fighting back pain during meditation and I finally

just went yes. Yeah, So there's a desire to awaken, you pursued it with great fervor, as you've talked about. So how does one do that? How does one honor that desire to awaken which does feel like a natural thing to some extent, but not find themselves in the trap of always going I wish I was awake. Yeah, it's a great question because it's just so relevant to

so many people. And you know, at the end of the day, we can I can talk about you know, almost like the ideal orientation, but none of us gets to make that decision, right there's we do not get to make that decision. My my orientation was striving, seeking with about as much gusto as you could, you know, conjure up without going totally insane. Um, is that the best way to do it? No, clearly is that the way that I had to go through. It seems like it. So I always have an eye like, where is somebody

what's authentically real for them? For some people, what's authentically real is diving into the seeking energy so that it can run itself off as fast as possible. With somebody else, you can just point out why it's unnecessary to approach it their way been approaching it, and they can shift to a different approach. So it's what I found is doing this for twenty two years, is that there is no blanket statement, no blanket teaching that you can give

to everybody. You know, I can say, well, yeah, the more you're striving towards you, you're actually blocking the realization that you're looking for. But sometimes that's what we have to go through before until we hit the moment like you had the retreat, where a number of things start being difficult to all at the same moment, and maybe something says, Okay, I just gotta let go of this. Yep,

I can't keep resisting in these all these ways. So you said something at that retreat that I thought spoke really well to this dilemma and has helped me a little bit. Was I think it was your teacher who told you that the use of will was to get you to the meditation cushion. But once you were there, that's the place to let go. That's a great if I said that, I'm really happy I said it, or whoever said it, well done. You don't have any memories,

so I can't take at it for it. But um, that's a really actually that's a good way of that is a pretty good way of putting it. Um, that's

the thing that you can't really put in language. Right, we're writing a balancing edge of too much will where it all becomes striving and seeking, and of course then you're always focused on what's not happening or what hasn't happened yet, or the other opposite, where you become so lackadaisical you just kind of think, well, it'll happen when it happens, and you'll utilize non dual terminology to help you be lazy about it, you know what I mean.

So those are the two extremes. Somewhere in the middle is where most of us actually experience our life. But somewhere in the middle that doesn't fall into the nice conceptual boxes. It's a little bit more probably like a flow state, you know. That's the the idea of effortlessness is really trying to get almost to something more like a flow state, rather than just make no effort and you know, right, have another doughnut and crack a beer

and watch TV and hope something that happens. That would not be the right, and I guess the reason it's so hard to describe or talk or not the reason. But if you look back, you know you're in the Zen tradition. I mean, they've been discussing this question forever. You know, if you're already perfect, why are you meditating? You know that that sort of concept, and so it's just a dilemma is the wrong word? Well, I guess it is a dilemma in some ways. And so that

leads me to my next question. You primarily had as a teacher someone who was completely unknown, a wonderful woman lived in a house very you know, just just her, and it was a very small group, and you were very intimate with her. Your world is you teach a lot of people. I don't know how many people were there in Omega. I want to say several hundred, you know, I don't know what, it doesn't matter, somewhere between three and three probably. Yeah, so a lot of people. So

people aren't working with you one to one. You've mentioned this is simply not tenable anymore. My question for you is, for somebody who is seeking awakening, how important is one on one time with a teacher versus interaction with a teacher. That's kind of like what most people have with you. It's a good question. Um again, I don't really have

a sort of final answer to that question. Um. It always comes down to each of us individually, right, The question isn't does in the broad sense does humanity need is a close working spiritual teacher or you know, it's it's like, well do I that's what's really Yeah? What what does it feel like to me? Do I feel like I I'm at a point where I could really use some more personalized guidance, or maybe I have something I want to discuss but I don't want to do

it in front of three people, or you know. So I mean, of course, when I started teaching, neither me or my teacher ever dreamed that it would take the form that it did. I think both of us thought, without even really talking about it, that it would look something pretty much like being into my living room. Um

so yeah. People do often get a false sense, though, of my relationship with my teacher ever there, Even though I went there every weekend, I probably asked her ten to fifteen really direct questions in the fourteen years I knew her. That had to do with my spiritual practice. We weren't kind of sitting around chumming chumming it up

and talking about it all day long. You know. It was a place where we went to meditate and do some chanting, and she'd give a talk, and then every once in a while she'd give a like a day long and then she'd see us privately. So yeah, it always goes back to the individual, doesn't it. You know. I'm that's the thing about. The longer I do this, the harder it is to articulate any part of it, because I see that the opposite of what I could say could almost be equal be true of almost anything

I say. You know what I mean. So, you know, do do people need teachers? Well? I don't know, dude. That's not really a relevant question, is it is? For anybody? It's do I where do I feel like I am? Do I need interesting? Do I need that? Ye? That's a great way to think about it, because there's certainly certain traditions that have that idea of that awakening almost comes from the teachers. Which I don't get that sense in your teaching that that's at all what you're saying. No,

it's not. It's not what I'm saying and I mean it's kind of a paradox because and then the whole definition that is a direct transmission from teacher to student outside of words and scriptures. Right, that definition has been there for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it can

easily lead to a false impression. Because look, if I could get somebody in a room with me and just do a moment of magic and have them awaken and stay that way, I mean that that's what I would do, right, We would just just start a McDonald's of awakening, you know, come hang out with the teacher for three minutes, and there you go. It doesn't actually happen that way, you know,

it just doesn't happen. I think what I what I see as what's often called transmission, and if it's useful, we can transmit energy, we can transmit experiences from one another if we know how to do that. Not that I'm giving you something, I know how to evoke it, right, A comedian knows how to evoke laughter from you. Are they giving you the laughter? No, but they're they're involved in in some relationship. So I think of it as the teacher acts almost like as an unconscious mirror. They're

mirroring back something for the student. In that sense, it's a transmission where I'm not giving you something that you don't already have. Of course, how could I give you your true nature? Right right? I could give you all sorts of experiences if I was skilled at doing that, But I couldn't. I couldn't actually give you what you are. That's, by the definition of that would be pretty impossible. Nor

is it a good idea to try. By the way, early on, I don't know if we discussed this last time we were together, but very early on I realized, almost by stumbling upon it, that that I could cause most of the people that came to me to have a kind of wakening experience. And it wasn't that I was giving them something and I would just sort of wake up a sort of presence, turn the dial up on it so it'd be so bright they would kind of overwhelm whatever mind state or you know, whatever place

they were in. Fortunately, I realized very early that even though to me that seemed to be a good thing, like, what's what couldn't be good about that? But um, but I saw really differently there was something it's very hard to put your finger on it. But there's something different about when when I was really almost intentionally trying to wake somewhat up, and then when it happens sort of on its own, with no intention, there's something that was

more pure about it when it didn't involve my intention. Um, there is something much more lasting if it didn't involve my intention. I was going to say, maybe it's a cause of brief experience, and then not last because I'm not going to standing next to anybody overwhelming their presence. It's like magic mushrooms, right like here you are, you know, and then right so I I just id stopped doing it, even though from my point it seemed like I had

all the all the right motivations. But what I saw was even the motivation for the teacher that's trying too hard to make something happen in their student isn't a good idea, and it's not a good idea for a student because awakening just simply doesn't end up to be good for everybody. If you're not ready for it. It can be so disorienting that it can actually make life

more difficult. You you talk about how people will have a realization or awakening experience moment, whether it be ten seconds or ten hours, or ten days or ten weeks, right, But the unconscious patterns will pull them back out of that space. So I'm curious about what some of those unconscious patterns are and how do people work with unconscious patterns. Yeah, and I'm sure I did explain it to you just as you depicted it for me. But I want to make it. I want to make a little bit of

a change. It's not so much that you get pulled out of the awakened perspective, as it sort of gets clouded. It's a very small thing, but but in the end it actually makes a big difference in one's approach because you're still there. You're still there. You can't not be there. I think that's one of the things that awakening shows you. Even if I feel like I'm not there um at the same time, strangely I know that I am. But that's not really good enough, right, because we don't want

to just know it. It can almost be frustrating. It can almost be frustrating, right. So what pulls us back mostly any um, any unresolved emotional conflict that could be between ourselves and us, between ourselves and the world, whoever whatever it is. Anything that's sort of unresolved has doesn't mean it will, but can have the power to that contracting energy can kind of you know, it can happen

within seconds. Right you're driving down the road, you're feeling open and spacious and lovely, and then somebody you know cut you off or almost hit you, and who knows how you're going to react. You know, it's it doesn't give it. It's not always some really big, complicated dark pattern as much as it's just sort of that emotional triggering. So what I'd like to tell people is, you know, awaking and will will blow a certain amount of one's conditioning,

unnecessary conditioning sort of out of their consciousness. For everybody. It's different. For some person, say blows out five, for somebody else that blows out you never know. But the stuff to pay attention to is what's reoccurring. Have I seen this pattern, you know, like ten times in the last month, Okay, then I need to pay attention to that.

I actually need to kind of maybe intentionally go meditate on that energy, like intentionally allow myself to feel that and if I have to think things to feel it, or go back to memories to feel it, fine, go go back there. Do it. It's almost like a willing suspension of higher truth, so you can get down into where it hasn't penetrated, right, because it's easy to stay on the outside and just kind of say to yourself, well, it's a passing thought form and you know, being a

very transcendent mindset, but that doesn't necessarily help it. So you get it evoked and then you see if you can really just um be with the be with the energy of it, because that's our resistance. Right, this isn't pleasant. I want to I don't want to be with this, so it goes somewhere else. But most of all this stuff is if you get one simple principle, and it is somewhat oversimplified, but I think it works an overwhelming majority of cases. Anything that's happened to us could be yesterday,

could be forty years ago. That was too big for us to remain conscious why we experienced it. It gets trapped in our system, that's what happens, right, And so it gets turned into some other emotion, or it just gets stuffed or something, and it's those things are just sort of they're waiting for you as if like the universe inside you were saying, Okay, can you experience this now?

Can you just experience this? And if you can, then it can go through you and you can start to find some release, and if you can't, then you tend to go just in circles. Again. Yep, that's such a big learning to be able to do that. It is like it's one of those really easy things to say, but when it comes to the moment, it doesn't always

seem that simple. But it does work. Yes, you tell a story about when your first moment of a huge heart awakening was when you had to put your your dog to sleep, and um, I just had to do that the other day, sorry to hear them. Yeah, it's the second and in like eight months. So it's been a tough year dog wise. But I have learned over time to just be okay with it in the sense of like, be okay with I'm fine with being sad, you know what. I'm not going to try and turn

away from that. I'm not going to try. And somebody asked me, are you at peace with it? And I said, well, that's so I'm not sure how to answer that, because philosophically or morally or you know, yes, dogs die, they get cancer, it happens, right, There's nothing the moral order has not been ripped apart by this event. But I'm very sad, so I'm not done with that, you know.

But my favorite thing I've heard you say, and I don't know it was in a book or heard you say it, but you know, let everything be exactly the way it is. And and that is such a powerful teaching and almost is easier for me in some ways to apply to big things like that than it is the trivial moment to moment, day to day. Strange, isn't it that my little comforts? Yeah? Well, the big stuff we often are we re confront like, I have really no option. I either push against us and suffer or

or I don't. The little stuff you can get, the little illusion, Well, I could kind of put this off or you know, it's easier to do a little dance maneuver um. But it is. It's one of those teachings. It's just so deceptively simple. And you know, I've been teaching it for twenty two years and I still find out what that teaching means. I'm still discovering a deeper understanding of what the teachings that I've been teaching for twenty two years is so, and I often have found

that to be the case. The truest in the sense of the most useful sort of statement. There's often a simplicity about them. Sometimes they're so simple that something that just say no, no, no, it couldn't be we have to have something more complicated than that. But often the most helpful stuff are the simple things that we're just kind of missing, you know what I mean? Ye, simple,

not easy, simple, not easy. But in the end, like your dog passes, right, it's easier to let yourself feel as bad as you feel, or feel whatever grief you feel without trying to shut it down. It's easier to do that in the end than to be trying to shut it down for the rest of your life. That's right, Yeah, yep, yeah, And I think I learned that. I've referenced her from time to time, Pema chodren Um her book When Things

Fall Apart. I learned that letting it like just giving myself to that moment, because one of the best things I ever learned to do, I think, because I feel current with things in my life. You know, his death didn't bring up all the pain from the last dog because I grieved the last dog, that's right, you know. And the last dog didn't bring up all the grief of my marriage or that marriage falling apart, because that had been you know, it's and I wasn't that way

for a large part of my life. I think every little thing that happened had, you know, a powder keg of emotion behind it, just waiting to blow. Yeah, And that's the nice things about we can we can actually transform yep. So another thing that you did at the retreat, and it's a it's a hand gesture. I can't listeners won't be able to see it, but it was a really a really useful thought for me. And it was something your teacher used to say to you all the time.

And she would say, less of this, which is a clenched fist for listeners, and more of this, which is an open hand for listeners. So talk to me about that in general. And I'm curious, is that still one you work with? Sure, it's you know, it's another one of those deceptively simple teachings and then until you start to really kind of contemplate it. And I like the

physical part of the gesture. I mean, anybody listening could put their hand in front of them themselves and make a fist and okay, that's what it means to hold on. That's how it physically feels. And then you let your fists go and you open your palm and it's like, okay, that's what it feels like to let go, because sometimes we literally kind of forget it, not in our minds, been in our bodies, our bodies like I'm trying to do something, but if they don't have a reference for

what that feels like. But yeah, my teacher told me that when I was well back to where we started, you know, hundred miles an hour gun and for enlightenment with everything I had, and I couldn't hear that teaching at the time. I literally just wasn't in a place where I could really hear it and utilize it. But I came to it nonetheless, you know, I came to it nonetheless because well, nothing else works. It's pretty simple, right,

Going through life with with lots of resistance just doesn't work. Right. It's not fun, it's it's not self expressive in any positive sense. It doesn't win you better friends. It just it's like not workable. Yeah, but you know, each one of us has to find that out in the grist of our own experience. Finding that out isn't always easy, yep, you know, because we usually do it through a few

pretty overwhelming moments. Yep. I think that's why I think the serenity prayer, I know it's we only hear a short part of it is maybe the wisest thing I have ever heard, because it covers that there's work to be done here, and there's plenty of times where you can't work you gotta And of course then that wisdom is the precious gold to tell the difference. But I can be on either of those extremes. I have an

ability to be like effort right. Yeah, that's not spiritual development, that's not I don't know what it is, but it's not a healthy pattern, right. So that means I've got to engage in the desire to change, you know. And then there's plenty of things where letting go is clearly

the important thing. And I had a thought about this, and I think it was after you did that and then this, and I thought about the phrase letting go, and I almost thought that in some cases it might be better just to think of let because letting go sometimes we can't, right, so let go, and I'm trying to let go, but it's not going, you know, whereas let is sort of like okay, yeah, like I like that, you know, here it is. If it goes great, If it doesn't, okay, but I'm not in control of that.

You're clear on what you can and can't do that. I'll often say something very similar to your let, which is nice and short, Okay, if you can't let it go, can you let it be? Yeah? Can you let it be? There? Just that, and that's kind of like your it's yeah, right, let it Can I do that? Because usually if we really honestly look at that one, more often than not the answer is yeah, I can let it be. And then gosh, what would that feel like to let it?

Because that, to me, that's the crucial step, Like what's the sense? What's the feel? So it's not intellectual anymore. It's like when you unclench your hand, you can feel it, it feels different, Yeah, right, you don't. It's the kind aesthetic experience of that I think is what we need. Kudos to your teacher for a very beautiful way to look at it, you know, because I've been banging a

rate in a really tough nut there for a while. Yeah, your heart, you know, I I can think of plenty of times where I was trying to let go with a clenched fist, you know, like I knew I should let go. I knew I would be better off if I let go. I just didn't have the ability to do it right. And sometimes that's that's the truth, right, Yeah,

I just can't do it right now. I think it's always good to normalize that for people, because I think I felt like I was failing, you know, evolve people, spiritual people, people in recovery, they let things go, and that's not working right now, So I must be failing. And you know, I wasn't any failing. If there was any failing, it was in the being too hard on myself. And sometimes failure ends up to be the part of triumph. Yeah, Like sometimes you just you gotta failure way through some stuff.

You can't do it all like neat and pretty and spiritual. Sometimes you just sort of fail your way through it. And but if you fail your way through something consciously, that can actually cause a sort of transformation. If you fail through something unconsciously with nothing but resistance, we tend to not transform much much from it. Yeah, but I love that that serenity prayer. I think that that ability to discriminate between what you can do and what you

can't do. You know, no know what you can do, but just important to what you can't do. And I think it's really important in any kind of spiritual practice that we have some real clarity about exactly what we can do, exactly what we can do. You used to work with students one on one, and I know that everybody's different. So not asking for a blanket statement, but some degree of practice seems to be part of the

equation or useful in the process. Absolutely essential cases. In that case, how would you think about building a practice? You know, what would it consist of? How often or how long or Again I'm not looking for exact answers maybe as so much as a way to think through it. Yeah. Now I appreciate the question, Eric, because I have thought this because my impulses, you know, to try to really help people find their own way, and so it's to

not give direct answers to a question like that. And yet you know, I've also seen that that's not always the best response either, because sometimes people just can't find their way. Yeah, you know, they just And I think one of the things I've learned from working with lots of people, you know, in the coaching work I do, is that ambiguity is the mother of procrastination in a lot of cases. Right, if I don't know what to do, now, I got to figure out what to do and do it.

If there's some clarity about that first part, then all I have to do is muster up the energy to do it, and we get stuck in that first part. Right, So for me, I would just say, yeah, if somebody wanted to engage in this or probably any spiritual teaching, but I'll keep it restricted to mind for the moment that Yeah, I would suggest that they do some meditation every day. I would love him to do, you know, at least a half an hour morning or evening. If I someone said, what's ideal, I do a couple of

times a day would be ideal. Um, don't push it to the sense that you start to hate it, however, because you don't want to get a relationship with the very notion of meditating as something that's arjorous and awful and something you don't want to do. I've been shaking that off for years while for an old Zen guy, it took me for a while to like rediscover like, actually sitting here can be really really nice. Yeah, yeah,

it hasn't got to be. It's nicer when it's not eighteen hours a day like the Zen folks do too. It is well they make, you know, get in trouble with Zen folks, but you know, us and Zen, we can't make a kind of fetish out of meditation. It's it's it's the Zen object of worship. Yeah, you know. And and part of that is really good because at least you're doing something, you're not just sitting around talking

about it. That sense, it's really really good. But when it becomes too emphasized, then maybe it's not so good. So I think spending some time in quiet is really that's the magic. That's the magic, that's that's what allows something inside of you that you don't have any conscious access to, something starts to occur within us beyond below what we're perceiving. Simply when we're sort of intentionally attending to a quiet space, there's something that happens underneath that.

That's very spiritually powerful. Who knows when it will manifest. But so that's pretty easy, right in the sense of to tell someone will meditate, try to meditate some every day. The other one is just as important, but not so easy to turn into a formula, because that's the kind of the inquiry part. And the inquiry can just be taken as sort of a tool like this is just what I do because it's supposed to be the thing to do, or I like to have inquired be a

manifestation of something more native to you. Right. So, if somebody comes up and they say I'm working on the question, who am I? You know, I often ask them why what does the question mean for you? Why are you interested in the question? Because I want to see if the question is actually there's if it's really relevant to them. Um. If I do find it's relevant to them, then we have something to work with. If not, then we find

something that is relevant. It's harder to take that and make it into a formula, right because it's almost like a wonderment at being. Yeah, just the mere fact of being a kind of a wonderment, and that by saying wonderment I don't mean to put a spiritual whitewash. It doesn't mean that it's always fun to do that. You know, at a certain point, when the resistance goes away, then

it's pretty darn and enjoyable. But I've often thought I would love everyone that came to see me have had like two or three really good years of pretty arduous meditation under their belt, and two or three really good years in college courses that taught them nothing but how to think l for themselves. And those are kind of polarized opposites. One right, it's kind of not thinking, and the other one is how to really think very clearly,

because I think we often don't learn that either. An inquiry is a way of using your thoughts and your perception in a really clear and really really precise way. You talk about it has to be precise, has to be precise. That's why I always orient towards Okay, what are you doing here? What do you want? Exactly precisely? What is this about for you? So that's part of it. And yeah, if we're gonna get precise, that's the key

that you have to be precise. You know. It's like someone can ask themselves like when i'll do this, it retreats. You may have seen me do it where I'm working with somebody through say who am I? And they'll go who am I? And they're not used to being as precise as I usually want them to be, And so I'll say, Okay, what happens when you ask that question? Well, I don't come up with an answer. No, that's not

the first thing that happened. What's the thing that has the right answer that you know you're supposed to arrive at. What what happened that caused your mind to say I didn't get the right answer? Something was being experienced. Well, when I asked myself who was I didn't find anything. Okay, Now that's interesting, isn't it? But all that just that right at the top, that can all be missed. If

you're not precise who am I? I don't know, maybe you have to ask the question another hundred thousand times. But if you're really precise, you asked the question, but you're looking at what that question is evoking in your experience. Yeah, that's what you're really looking for. What is it evoking in my experience? Present time? Then there's no future to it. That's it. You know, you talked about the ability to

think very well for themselves. You know, one of the things that I've heard you stress over and over, and it's one of those things that I think can hear it deepen and deepening levels. Like I think you've said something to the effective spirituality is the direct investigation of your experience, Like we have to be willing to look closely for ourselves and be willing to trust what we find there, even if what we find there isn't where we think it should be. Like you know, sometimes if

I look for myself, I think I find something. I know the answer is it's not supposed to be there, right, So trust in that for me has been important in going that's what I see and feel. Now, I can keep working with it and eventually go past it. But if I skip that, and I'm certainly not trying to say like I've got this figured out in any way, I'm just trying to stress the importance of trusting ourselves to some extent and looking at our experience, not yours,

not some enlightened beings. What's happening with me right now? When I ask his questions experience, when there's a lot of that going on, you know what I mean. So I think you're right in the sense of our experience is where it's at, and it's one of those really simple things, right, But when you go to do it, you realize it's not so simple at all. I'm so used to comparing my experience to everything around me that I never have my experience for more than like a

quarter second before I'm comparing it. So um, Like you said, if if if you were doing this inquiry and you you came back and said, a, yeah, I really feel like I'm coming up with herself, I would say, Okay, well let's explore that. Tell me about that, and we dive into that. It may sound like because I've done it for myself, but I don't necessarily go when I'm worth somebody with a preconceived idea of what I think they're supposed to see. Whatever they see is that's what

they see. Um. As long as their own experience, then we can just keep looking through the layers of that. Right. As I tell people, the only way to get us wrong is to not be ruthlessly honest about what's happening in your experience. The only way you can get it wrong is to not do that. But outside of that, you're not getting it wrong. Yeah. Boy, is that hard to do for people? Yeah, it brings to mind for me how we are afraid to be wrong, how much

we want to have the right answer. And also, you know, you talk a lot about not turning your authority over to someone else. You know, the word spiritual teacher has a sense of like my teacher, and most of our experiences with teachers is you've got to give them the right answer when they ask a question, there's a right answer. And so the very idea of saying my experience of that is very different. I know what the right answer is because I read the book, but I'm not having

that experience. And I just think that's so hard for us, is to is to say I don't know it is or that's not what's happening. Well, we've we've mythologized the role of the spiritual teacher, which doesn't help us out. What do religions do with their authority figures. They dressed

them up to look like kings and queens. That's what they do, right, whether it's Christianity or Buddhism or whoever it is, you dress the authority up as if they're a king and queen, and then we wonder why we have so much projection going on around Whereas having been with my teacher as long as I have been, there is something that goes beyond the bounds of like say, relating to a spiritual teacher is like a college professor or something, which I think is actually a pretty healthy

place to start. Relate to your teacher kind of more like that, kind of more like if you were in a college. You know, over time, you know, my relationship part with my teacher became more just something. There was a different element that was added. It was more like a profound combination of respect and gratitude got mixed in over time. But that was over time, right, It wasn't immediately manufactured out of nothing, which would have just made it a projection. So I think when people initially go

to teachers, they're probably best too. They're going to assume any kind of stance something more like listening to a college professor, at least initially is probably a good idea, yea. And to always remember that or be aware of that balance between you go to a teacher for hopefully some wise counsel and advice, right, so in that sense, you're open and you're available, and maybe you'll even try some

of it. But the balance part is, at the same time, you're not pretending like you're a spiritual child or infant, right, You're you're looking at the advice. You're seeing if it seems good and rational and worth doing for yourself. And so there's all these many decisions that are actually getting made all along the point I would just say make them consciously. Yep, you know, um, because there's just the thing where we make spiritual teachers like kings and queens.

It does not serve awakening. It just doesn't It doesn't help, yep, you know, it just doesn't help. And it makes people, of course very vulnerable to replaying whatever unhealthy relational patterns they've had in their life. Yeah, they'll tend to do it with their teacher. It's been a long time since Martin Luther did what he did, right, But it was that you, the regular people, have access to the Word of God yourself. You can read the book. You don't

have to go through these people. Um right, excellent. Well, let's wrap this up for part one, and when we come back, more questions about practice and self inquiry m M. 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