Excuse #1: The Biggest

blowing bubbles
Originally uploaded by MorningThief581

The barriers to awakening are all conceptual. The biggest barrier to awakening is believing, “Not me, it couldn’t possibly happen to me.” When that barrier is dropped, then the awakening is almost a forgone conclusion because you suddenly run out of excuses. When an individual runs out of excuses, they tend to get very serious and stop wasting time. As long as we say, “It’s only for the few,” we have an unconscious excuse not to take on the possibility ourselves and live up to what that possibility may ask of us.

Adyashanti, “The Awakening West: Conversations with Today’s New Western Spiritual Leaders.” P199.

“The barriers are all conceptual.”
Is that true?

I don’t think so.
But, I do trust Adya and luckily he encourages his students to accept nothing as a “given.” He wants us to find our own truth... So, I don’t feel too guilty expressing my doubts.

I believe that every state of consciousness is supported by a unique physiology.
Thus, there has to be some kind of physiology correlated with becoming enlightened. Maybe this is the same as, or maybe it is different from, the physiology needed to sustain enlightenment – but, initially something has to change within the body for someone to become enlightened… at least to my way of thinking.

It is this unique physiology that to me seems to offer a concrete barrier not at all “conceptual,” but rather physical.

For example, Maharishi said you had to get rid of all the stress in the body – the impressions of experiences that had overwhelmed and essentially scarred the nervous system. So there was this whole idea of “unstressing” or “normalizing” in TM in order to become enlightened.

I had another meditation teacher, an intuitively guided woman largely without tradition. She insisted that “every cell in your body must change.”
When I heard her say that I thought, “Yes! I have seen that. It is true and I’ve never heard anyone say that.”

Every cell must change. … and that is physiology and that it physical, even when it occurs within the “mythic” elements of EARTH, AIR, FIRE, WATER. I have seen this and to me, it is just the subtle physiology, the nervous system on the level of light. (Though, curiously, some systems of classification may place the subtle elements in the mental realms.)

So, my excuse for not being enlightened is that my physiology has not yet allowed it. My body is too screwed up.