As I sit poised on the razor’s edge of a difficult intimate relationship, having tried everything and more. Looking at the incredible love in the relationship and a pain that only comes a close 2nd, I see that..
The ‘I’ must burn itself completely to discover what is love.
And that burning is the loving.
And these facebook updates take birth out of my churning…
I am learning as I stumble n learn to walk the razor’s edge of the truth of love that … To really be together with another in an intimate relationship, I must learn to stand alone.
If I cannot be ‘together’ inside me, there is a fat chance that I can be together with an apparent other.
The way I deal with a conflict and contradiction inside me is by making a demand of the other. And I am seeing that a love can only tell the beloved, ‘I belong to you’ and not demand that ‘you belong to me’
I am willing to see and be what I need to be.. to offer myself to this truth of love.
And this piece (below) in Adyshanti’s masterpiece, ‘End of Your world’ makes way to my heart. Its also a series of audios on Youtube and the book can be ordered from here (amazon.in). Thanks dearest Ananta (Sangha of Being) for bringing this book n wisdom to me. Thanks Rohit for bringing Ananta and the Sangha! 😉 Om you had pointed to these audios first.
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TS : You mentioned that all spiritual paths ultimately bring us to a state of total surrender. But what if the parts of us that don’t want to surrender are hidden, quite buried in our psyche? Consciously, we might surrender everything, but some part of us in our unconscious might still be clutching. How do we get those hiding places to come forward? I can imagine hearing your teaching on surrender and thinking, okay, I basically understand. I know what it means to be on my knees. I know what it means to throw myself down on the ground. But what about the parts in me that won’t surrender? They‘re not obvious to me.
ADYA: There may be nothing you can do about it. This is the thing that people avoid the most, right? Give me something; give me a teaching; give so hope. Of course, inside of us there are totally unconscious ways of holding – patterns of holding that we don’t have any access to. Maybe you don’t have to access to it, period. End of story. That’s it.
You will have access to it at the exact moment that you are meant to have access to it. We may not like that. People may not like to hear that, let’s look at our lives, not philosophy or teaching or what we choose to tell ourselves, right?
At least in my life, I can certainly look and see that there were moments where I did not have certain capacities yet. They just weren’t there. I have no idea what I could have done to bring those capacities forward. At certain points, I couldn’t even hear somebody who told me how to have those capacities.
I had my own teacher tell me certain things literally hundreds of times over the years. And only after ten years did I think, “oh . . . now I get it. Now I understand. Now it has sunk in.” How was I going to force it ten years before? Could I have forced it? It doesn’t appear as though I could have.
This may not be the empowering spiritual teaching you are looking for, but everything has its time; everything has its place. Ego is not in control of what’s happening. Life is in control of what’s happening. To insist that something can empower us, all at once, to dive into ourselves and see anything we need to see to awaken, is working at odds with people’s experience.
Everything happens in its time. We’re not in control. This isn’t something we want to hear, though, is it? It isn’t something our mind wants. Mostly we want to hear things that empower our sense of control. And we radically push away anything that does not empower our sense of control.
I say this to people all the time. When you start to accept what you see as true – not what I say, but your experience – that’s when everything starts to change.
Many times students come to me and say, “I can’t do anything about this, this part of my delusional apparatus, this part of my personality.” They’ll ask, “What do I do? What do I do?” often I say, “No, nothing’s worked so far” and I ask, “Can you find anything to do? Can you see anything to do?” and sometimes they tell me, “Nothing honestly, I can’t see anything to do.” And I’ll say, “What will happen if you actually ingested that part of your experience that is telling you there is nothing you can do? What if you took it in instead of trying to push it away?”
Often, when they take this in – not just conceptually, not as a teaching that can be dismissed, but really allowing it into the body- then this realization of what it is like to live without resistance starts to change everything. Sometimes the experiences that we are pushing away contain the most transformative insights we need to have. Who would suspect that seeing that there’s nothing, nothing, I can do is going to be transformative? We’re not taught that. We’re taught to avoid that piece of knowledge at all costs. Even if it’s part of your experience, year after year, decade after decade – even if you keep experiencing the same thing over and over – the impulse is to avoid it, to not let it in, to push it away. See what I mean?
We’re all junkies. Really, we’re all just junkies wanting to be high and free. It’s the same dynamic. It’s the alcoholic who realizes, “There nothing that I can do,” who is on the way to sobering up. As long as that person sitting there is saying, “I can do this. I’m in control. I can find a way beyond this,” no transformation is going to happen. Bottoming out is nothing more than coming out of denial. There’s nothing I can do, look where I am. We don’t need to know so much about what to do. We need to have a mirror in front of us, so we are able to see what we see. When that alcoholic sees and that drug addicts sees that there is nothing that they can do, that they are powerless to stop their addiction – only then do they start to see themselves in a clearer light.
There’s a transformation that starts to happen that is not contrived; it is not practiced; it is not technique oriented. To me, spirituality is a willingness to fall flat on your face. That’s why, although my students often put me up on a pedestal and think I’ve figured out something wonderful, I tell them all the time: my path was the path of failure. Everything I tried I failed. It doesn’t mean that trying didn’t play an important role. The trying did play a role. The effort did play a role. The struggle did play a role.
But it played a role because it got me to an end of that role. I danced that dance until it was extinguished. But I failed. I failed at meditating well; I failed at figuring out the truth. Everything I ever used to succeed spiritually failed. But at the moment of failure, that’s when everything opens up.
We know that, right? This isn’t sacred knowledge. Almost everybody knows this; we’ve experienced it in our lives. We’ve seen moments like this. But it’s not something we want to know, because it’s not convenient.
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Such wisdom to be willing to not know. However scared we are to enter that region, it is sacred. nd sooner or later we must reside in that.
Wow ! Beautiful and amazingly true Kiran. Just what I needed to hear to reascertain my own feelings. Thank you Bro ! This also ascertains what Adya says .
regs
Prakash
hey prakash.. I would recommend you check out his book, ‘End of your world’ and also the youtube videos by the same title. the book has touched me deeply and continues to..
love
kiran