tekst 12 juni 2021

Tijdens The School for The Work in oktober 2007 gaf iemand mij een briefje met de verwijzing naar Adyashanti als iemand specialized in emboying your awakeness. Thuis bleef het jaren in de map wachten totdat ik er aan herinnerd werd ergens in 2013. Hoewel geraakt in mijn hart bij het beluisteren van diverse lezingen, duurde het tot december 2016 voordat ik mij inschreef voor een cursus, The Philosophy of Enlightenment. Daar is het niet bij gebleven. Inmiddels heb ik thuis een studiegroepje (2017 gestart). Sinds april 2021 is er de gelegenheid om zes dagen in de week om 8 uur ‘s ochtends online samen te komen voor afwisselend stilte en geleide meditatie. Heb je belangstelling hiervoor, neem dan contact op.

In het kader van een online bijeenkomst met andere gathering hosts deelde ik mijn ervaring.

Sharing about my spiritual unfolding and what the teachings of Adya evoke

“If what I say, sounds familiar to you, it’s something worthwhile attending to”, I heard Adya say. “My only intention is to evoke something in you that is already there. Don’t believe me. Be curious and inquire yourself.”

Years before I got to know Adyashanti through YouTube videos, I wrote the following:

Some people only see a smile in me. Others only the tear. There are those of whom their view reaches no further than a smile and a tear.
Few recognize in me the silent deep joy that holds both the smile and the tear, and gives them their shine.

Those who see the smile, want to be entertained or cheered up. Those who see a tear, want to comfort me or give advice. To whom I am only both a smile and a tear, I create confusion. They need clarity and want me to make a choice and that I overcome myself.
Only for those who recognize the silent deep joy, I am.

The silent deep joy I’m talking about here, can be perceived subtly and can easily be neglected in the turmoil of life. It seems of no significance. Yet I experience it as something that determines the whole of my life. When I put it into words, I couldn’t avoid it any longer. There was a lure, soft as a silent presence, like the echo of the ground of existence.
Gradually I recognized the resonance in the story of others as well. Their language, some of which already seemed familiar to me, became fuller in sound and flavor. It grounds my existence.

For a long time my spiritual orientation revolved around my attempt to flee from that which characterizes being human: from pain, sorrow, fear, anger, up to happiness. I believed that attaining enlightenment would deliver me from suffering. Although I had had a fundamental and blissful shift in my experience of identity and reality around the age of 24, I didn’t recognize it as enlightenment. It presented me with new challenges that took their toll. Enlightenment is continuous bliss, isn’t it? Well, I didn’t experience that. For me it was more like a roller coaster. Though I couldn’t deny what I’d been through, I underestimated its value. Yet something of bliss continued to shine through it all.
Until then, I had never cared much about God. In search of the truth I discovered how the word God resonated with this new perception of reality. It took on an essential meaning for me and I allowed myself to call reality by name. Regardless of my circumstances, I felt myself being in God and experienced God in me.

Confusion took over because of my need to understand. It got worse when I looked for recognition and support from others, in particular when the other person presented him/herself as an authority, as a teacher. I yearned for dialogue about ones own experience in order to get more clarity and understanding. An exchange out of mutual interest and on an equal level.
Adyashanti is a teacher who speaks from his own experience. He dwells on being purely present in the experience. When illuminating it he knows how to discern aspects of Being and to articulate them clearly. He also impresses that language can never convey experience in its fullness. It’s just a pointer. Therefore, inquire your own experience to get your own insight. That’s why he invites you to recognize your own authority, recognize it wisely by remaining open to development and to realize that your comprehension is always limited. As majestically as it may seem to you at times, as soon as you grab hold of something, you also have to let it go.
Thanks to his directions it has become clear to me how to speak of enlightenment as an ongoing process. It’s very different from what the sails pitch for enlightenment would have made me believe.

The way he speaks clarifies my process. It helps me to orient. Recognizing what is already going on by itself, joining it and expressing it, is powerful. Illuminated aspects of Being search for mutual balance and resolution.
In this way I have learned to discern between enlightenment of the mind, heart and gut, respectively the conceptual, emotional and existential aspects of consciousness. The concept of enlightenment in this sense refers to the experience of receptive clarity, loving presence (detached intimacy) and the ground of Being; the latter both as the formless (vital space, pure potentiality) and as form (all of existence, flesh and blood). By discerning this in the current experience, so not just cognitively, I have a better relationship with and understanding of my own experience and development. Am I aware when consciousness contracts around a manifestation on any of these aspects? When I identify with or fixate thoughts or feelings? Or turn against existence as it is, a big NO? That NO is known by fear of death, or non-existence, or the flipside of it, fear of life, incarnation. Can I reconcile myself with changeability and not-knowing?
Who did I have in mind when I wrote this? To whom I am only both a smile and a tear, I create confusion. They need clarity and want me to make a choice and that I overcome myself.
Doesn’t this also reflect my own self-rejection and longing for belonging?
My life goes back and forth between clarity, openness and trust on the one hand and tension on the other. Nothing human is alien to me. Nothing human is withheld from me. Instead of escaping it, I invite myself again and again to be present and integrate it by sensing its course. Consciousness of the silent deep joy is the supportive ground.

EK MOES DEUR BAIE PYN…
Elisabeth Eybers
translation Anja Strik (oorspronkelijke tekst te lezen onderaan de pagina via deze link)

I HAD TO GO THROUGH GREAT PAIN…

I had to go through great pain to become human,
to recognize within myself the wider Self;
my costly spikenard ointment was poured out
before I could win the richer inheritance

to which my lone soul desperately aspired to
or what he proudly spurned: first when my mind
was willing to suffer physical pain
have I learned to be human, to be woman,

one like everyone else. Happiness,
as strong and calm as if a great silent man
had crossed the threshold of my heart
and there found neither pride nor bitter desire.
I suddenly discovered: from now on
no more, thank god! half-god, half-crazy, but human!

Inspiration

This prayer originated when contemplating on the wholeness/totality of being during the online course Fierce Love.

Fierce Love

My true being is neither flesh and blood
nor pure potentiality.
My true being is the engaging in
the all-encompassing play of ‘hide and seek’
(contract and open up)
as potentiality incarnated throughout
the living story of being and becoming
without beginning and end.
Communing with heart consciousness
vitalizes the space in which the engaging truly exists.
May love and wisdom together
enlighten the way life unfolds.
May they nourish the awareness
and felt sense of the truth about us
connecting with all beings
and in relationship give rise to the expression
of their true nature.

tekst 5 april 2018

As a vision I wasn’t able to share with others, it seemed a memory. As a memory I started to doubt its value and almost lost the sight of it. I reconnected with the inner truth not because of its value over other truths – then it would be mere a thought process, a philosophy – but because its alive in me and I don’t feel alive outside of it.

And yes, I still experience being nourished when connecting with people on a deep level. And yes, I do want to meet this way. At the moment I can let go of this urge to express myself out of a hungry feeling, out of this desire to being affirmed in my way of being. Through exercising of the heart, space has opened up to let life take its course and be present to its opportunities. For now.