Once we have seen beyond the veil, unless the illusion of me completely gives up all at once (which is very rare), the journey from that point on is very much about the complete dissolving of the remnants of personal will. Cause it’s the personal will that will go, “I want that experience back!”
And the Truth will say, “You have no power to get it back!”…
Oh you may be able to do it for awhile and some of you have. You learn what I call the spiritual chiropractic tricks of the trade. You heard a phrase and it kind of cracks your consciousness into clarity. And so you say that phrase to yourself every time you get into a state of disharmony or illusion.
And it works for a while…
And then it doesn’t work and you find some other trick of the trade, a little spiritual chiropractic-like adjustment. And they work and they bring clarity back into place. But over time everybody inextricably gets to the same place. As long as they work, great! Use them.
But I guarantee you the time will come when one by one they stop working, until eventually nothing works – nothing…
And then you encounter the total futility of any vestige of personal will… and in that is the invitation for total, spontaneous surrender of the whole thing… a total abandoning of self altogether.
Adyashanti, at the Omega Institute, July, 2007.
I have been thinking of these words the past few weeks, as things seem to be working less and less. But, I couldn’t recall just where I’d heard them. Then last night, quite by accident I came across them on a CD.
Oh, gee.
I edited out Adya’s comment at the end. As we all sat there kind of with our mouths open he added, “This is good news. Right?”
Oh or Ugh is how I feel.
Perhaps I’m creeping towards this point.
My adjustment of late has been repeatedly “letting go.”
Pick up the worry, the judgment, the pain, see it in my hands and then just let it go.
The mind complains even as the previous problem plops there on the ground.
And so I drop the complaint on top of that.
I have assumed I’m practicing some variety of surrender.
Then I heard Adya explain surrender is not something that we do it is what we are.
“I am surrender.”
… well, I’ve not yet seen that.
I am Silence, I am Unbounded, I am Nothing even.
But, Surrender?
That’s a verb.
Yesterday, I also came across this poem by Roethke.
I had never read it before and it left me stunned, as “Jesus!” escaped softly from my lips there in the lab.
It kind of fits with the hard, good news of Adya’s teaching.
But the language takes you to another level.
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke
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