By Adyashanti
Above the entrance to the Oracle at Delphi were written the words,
“Know Thyself.” Jesus came along and added a sense of urgency and
consequence to the ancient idea when he said, “If you
bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If
you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth
will destroy you.”
What Jesus is saying is that spirituality is serious business, with
serious consequences. Your life hangs precariously in the balance,
teetering between a state of unconscious sleepwalking and eyes-wide-open
spiritual enlightenment. The fact that most people do not see life this
way testifies to how deeply asleep and in denial they truly are.
Within each of our forms lies the existential mystery of being. Apart
from one’s physical appearance, personality, gender, history,
occupation, hopes and dreams, comings and goings, there lies an eerie
silence, an abyss of stillness charged with an etheric presence. For all
of our anxious business and obsession with triviality, we cannot
completely deny this phantasmal essence at our core. And yet we do
everything we can to avoid its stillness, its silence, its utter
emptiness and intimate embrace.
To remain unconscious of being is to be trapped within an
ego-driven wasteland of conflict, strife, and fear that only seems
customary because we have been brainwashed into a state of suspended
disbelief where a shocking amount of hate, dishonesty, ignorance, and
greed are viewed as normal and sane. But it is not sane, not even close
to being sane. Nor is it based in reality. In fact, nothing could be
less real than what we human beings call reality.
By clinging to the mind in the form of memory and thought, we are
held captive by the movement of our conditioned thinking and
imagination, all the while believing that we are perfectly rational and
sane. We therefore continue to justify the reality of what causes us, as
well as others, immeasurable amounts of pain and suffering.
Deep down we all suspect that something is very wrong with the way we
perceive life but we try very, very hard not to notice it. And the way
we remain blind to our frightful condition is through an obsessive and
pathological denial of being — as if some dreadful fate would
overcome us if we were to face the pure light of truth and lay bare our
fearful clinging to illusion.
The question of being is everything. Nothing could be more
important or consequential — nothing where the stakes run so high. To
remain unconscious of being is to remain asleep to our own
reality and therefore asleep to reality at large. The choice is simple:
awaken to being or sleep an endless sleep.
https://www.adyashanti.org/