How Very Strange In Deed

come closer.
Originally uploaded by solecism.

Adyashanti’s Winter Newsletter has thoughts that bear upon all this. They are entitled “Everything Comes Back to Nothing.” Here’s a shortened version of what he said:

Inexplicably it comes. When you least expect it. For a reason you can never know. One moment you are striving, figuring, imagining, and then, in the blink of an eye, it all disappears. The struggle disappears. The striving disappears. The person disappears. The world disappears. … Only awareness remains. Nothing else. …

Then everything- all the struggle, all the striving, all the thinking, all the figuring, all the surrendering, all the letting go, all the grabbing hold of, all the praying, all the begging, all the cursing too- was just a distraction. And only then is it seen that the person was, is, and ever will be no more than a thought. With a single thought, the person seems to reemerge. With more thoughts, the world seems to reemerge right out of nothing. But now you know.

The incarnation is nothing more than a thought. A thousand incarnations are but a thousand thoughts. And this amazing miracle of a mirage we call the world reappears as it was before, but now you know. That’s why you usually have a good laugh, because you realize that all your struggles were made up. You conjured them out of nothing…

And so at times we talk, and I pretend to take your struggles seriously, just as I pretend to take my own seriously… We are making up whether we need to hold on or surrender or figure it out or pray to God or be purified or have karma cleansed- it’s all a thought… There is only what you create and believe to be so. And if you like it that way, have at it!

But we cannot continue this absolute farce indefinitely…It’s impossible. Everything comes back to nothing.

And then it’s a bit harder to hold a straight face consistently for the rest of your life.
Adyashanti, Pacific Grove, CA. 2006