Adya

CHAPTER NINE

When Awakening Penetrates the Mind, Heart, and Gut

At the age of twenty-five, after the initial awakening that I have described, I could have assumed, “Oh, this is it; this is all there is to it; I’ve seen the absolute nature of reality.” I could have gone about proclaiming to the world what I had discovered. But I was very lucky that there was a small voice inside of me that said, “This isn’t really it. This isn’t the whole of it. Keep going.”

This little voice was like a savior in a sense. Because, at that particular point in the journey, there is a great tendency to want to grasp what is seen, to claim it, own it, and then to go about making a new “enlightened self,” an “enlightened me” out of what has been realized.

I was lucky to have this voice inside. Sometimes the voice that tells us to keep going comes from outside of us—from circumstances, from life itself. Either way, it is essential that an initial awakening isn’t owned or claimed—that there is no assumption of completion. Even though it may feel like the journey has ceased, it is important to realize that it is the old journey that has ceased, the journey toward that initial seeing, the journey where you didn’t have any consciousness of who and what you were. Now a new journey begins—the journey of expressing nondivision at every level of your being. And this is a journey that may take years to complete itself.

What Does It Mean to Be Undivided?

In these teachings, I’ve talked about being undivided, and I’ve equated awakening with being in an undivided state. But I want to make sure that no one gets a mistaken idea of what it means to be undivided. Nondivision is the effect of awakening; it is the expression of the realization of our true nature. As I have said, being undivided has nothing to do with being perfect or saintly. Also, there is no guarantee after awakening that, in any particular moment, you will not experience division in some way; there is no guarantee that division will never happen again. In fact, to be free, to be awakened, is to let go of concern with such things, with how awakened one is or isn’t.

One of the great poems of the Zen tradition ends with this description of the awakened state: “To be without anxiety about imperfection.” So, to be undivided does not mean to be perfect. Being undivided does not conform to images we might have in our mind about holiness or perfection. If someone were to look at my life, I’m sure they could come up with lots of reasons to say something like, “Oh, that doesn’t fit my idea of what an enlightened being would be. That doesn’t fit my image of what an undivided being is like.” I’m sure that my life would probably not conform to a lot of people’s ideals about what they think enlightenment should look like. Because, in truth, I’m much more of an ordinary person than most people would imagine. To me, part of awakening is dying into ordinariness, into nonanxiety.

Regardless of what someone might say looking at my life or anyone else’s life, the state of nondivision is not something you can understand until it starts to wake up within you. I can only encourage you not to believe any image that may arise in your mind of holiness or perfection, because these images only get in the way. Being undivided—seeing and acting from nonseparation, from oneness—is something that we must each discover for ourselves. What is it to see beyond love and hate, beyond good and evil, beyond right and wrong? These things must be discovered in your own experience. Evaluating other people’s experience of nondivision is not helpful. The only thing that matters is where you are. In any moment, are you experiencing and acting from division, or are you experiencing and acting from oneness? Which is it?

As I have mentioned, awakening impacts people in different ways depending on their conditioning. One model that I have found useful in working with students is to consider how awakening impacts us on three different levels of our being: at the mental level (the level of the mind), at the emotional level (the level of the heart), and at the existential level (the level of the gut). As awakening penetrates the totality of our being, we can experience varying degrees of nondivision at each of these levels. Please keep in mind that these three levels are metaphoric; this is just a tool to help make sense of something that people experience. As long as this conceptual model isn’t held with too much rigidity, it may be of use.

At the moment of an authentic awakening, Spirit is completely liberated on all levels of being, all at once. All of a sudden we become awakened to a view, to a way of perceiving, that is totally different than anything we previously knew. In the wake of that event we may or may not stabilize in that full and complete view equally at all levels of our being. Often it is like a bungee cord that completely extends itself, but then through certain karmic tendencies, pulls itself back. It never goes all the way back to where it started before awakening, but it retracts to a certain level. This can happen unevenly, in different ways throughout our being.

Awakening at the Level of the Mind

Let’s begin by looking at what happens at the level of the mind in the wake of an experience of realization. What does it mean to experience nondivision at the level of the mind? We all know what it is like to be divided on the level of mind, to have one thought in conflict with another, to have one part of the mind saying, “I should do this,” and another part of the mind saying, “I shouldn’t do that.” To have a divided mind is to have a mind in conflict with itself.

Most of our minds are in great conflict. Our patterns of thinking move back and forth between good and bad, right and wrong, holy and unholy, worthy and unworthy, and even between enlightened and unenlightened. These polarizing thoughts cause the experience of divisiveness at the level of the mind.

As we awaken and that awakening penetrates and is revealed at the level of mind, what we first see is that nothing in the structure of thought is ultimately true. Now don’t misunderstand me—I’m not saying that the mind is without value or is somehow bad. The mind, which is nothing but thought, is a tool, like all other tools. It is a tool like a hammer, a saw, or a computer is a tool.

But in the state of consciousness that most human beings are in, the mind is easily mistaken for something it’s not. The mind is not seen as a tool, but instead as the source of a sense of self. Most people are constantly asking their mind, “Who am I?” “What is life?” “What is true?” They’re looking to their mind to tell them what should and shouldn’t be. This is ridiculous! You wouldn’t go into your garage and ask your hammer who you are or what’s the right or wrong thing to do. If you did, and your hammer could speak back to you, it would probably say, “What are you asking me for? I’m the wrong tool to be asking these kinds of questions.”

But we do that with the mind. We’ve forgotten that the mind is a tool—a very powerful and useful tool. Everything begins in the mind. Every car you drive, every building you enter, every shopping mall you go into—all of it started as a thought in someone’s mind. That thought was then deemed useful and necessary, and the idea was made manifest through action. So the mind is powerful and useful.

But in human consciousness, the mind is not seen simply as a tool. What has happened instead is that the mind has usurped reality. It has become its own reality to such an extent that we human beings find our sense of self—who we think we are, our self-image—in our thinking process.

As the light of awakening starts to penetrate on the level of mind, we see that mind has no inherent reality to it. It’s a tool that reality can use, but it’s not reality. In and of itself, a thought is just a thought. A thought has no truthfulness to it. You can have the thought of a glass of water, but if you’re thirsty, you can’t drink the thought. You can think about a glass of water until you die, but to actually pick up a physical glass and drink the water is a totally different experience. You can pick up the glass and drink the water without any thought of glass or water. And so thought itself is empty; it’s empty of reality. At best, thought is symbolic. It may point in the direction of a truth or an object, but many thoughts don’t even do that. Many thoughts in human consciousness are just thoughts thinking about other thoughts—thinking about thinking. Meditators will be meditating, and one thought will be, “I shouldn’t be thinking.” But, of course, that thought is, itself, a thought. It’s very easy to get trapped in various loops of thinking about thinking.

As we awaken on the level of mind, we begin to perceive from beyond the mind. We realize that the mind itself is empty of reality, and this is a profound realization. It’s easy to say that the mind is empty of reality. It may even be an easy thing for some people to understand. But to see that the mind is empty of reality is radical in the extreme. It’s radical to see that our whole sense of self and the world is created in the mind. When we see that the structure of thought holds no intrinsic reality, we come to see that the world as we perceive it, through the mind, can’t have any reality. This is earthshaking; the self that we perceive ourselves to be has no reality.

Awakening on the level of mind is the destruction of your entire world. This is something that we can never, ever anticipate. What is destroyed is our entire worldview—all the ways we are conditioned, all of our belief structures, all of the belief structures of humanity, from the present time to the distant past—all of them go into forming this particular world, this consensus that human beings have agreed upon, this viewing of things as true, literally down to “I’m a human being” or “There is such a thing as a world” or “The world needs to be a particular way.” Awakening on the level of mind is a complete destruction of all of this, and thus of our entire world.

When we awaken at the level of the mind, we begin to think, “My goodness, the way I saw the world was a complete fabrication, literally the stuff of dreams. It had no basis in reality whatsoever. The way I saw myself was also completely fabricated.” It doesn’t matter whether you see yourself as enlightened or unenlightened, good or bad, worthy or unworthy. Nondivision at the level of mind is to have all of these ego structures completely wiped away. It’s almost impossible for me to coherently express how thorough this destruction of the world is on the mental level. It is to see that there is no such thing as a true thought and to get that at the deepest level, to see that all of the models we create, even the spiritual models, the teachings, are literally the stuff of dreams.

Buddha himself said that all dharmas are empty. The dharmas are the teachings. The dharmas are the very truths he was speaking. One of the truths he was speaking was that all of these dharmas, all these truths that he just told to his students, are all empty. The truth of who you are lies far beyond even the greatest dharmas, the greatest sutras, the greatest ideas that could ever be spoken or written down or read.

This is experienced inwardly as destruction. I often tell people to make no mistake about it—enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being more or less happy. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true—from ourselves to the world.

In this process we discover that even the greatest inventions of the greatest minds in human history are but the dreams of children. We start to see that all the great philosophies and all the great philosophers are part of the dream. Awakening at the level of the mind is like pulling back the curtain, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. She expects to see the Great Oz, but when the curtain is pulled back, it turns out that the Great Oz is a little man pulling levers. Seeing through the nature of mind is like this. It’s a radical thing. It’s unexpected when we see that everything that purports to be truth is actually part of the dream state and is holding the dream state together.

There is no such thing as an enlightened thought. It is quite a shock to our system to see this. In fact, most of us protect ourselves from seeing this truth. We say we want truth, but do we really? We say we want to know reality, but when it appears, it’s so different from what we thought. It doesn’t fit into our context; it doesn’t fit with our images. It’s something completely beyond them. It’s not just beyond them, it actually destroys our ability to see the world in the old way. It renders our world rubble.

When it is all said and done, what we are left with is nothing. We are totally empty-handed, with nothing to grasp on to. As Jesus said, “The birds have their nests in the trees and the foxes have their holes in the ground, but the son of man has nowhere to rest his head.” There is no concept, no thought structure upon which you can rest.

This is what total release means. Only with complete release can the truth of what we are shine through undistorted. But this complete release on the level of mind is not something that usually happens thoroughly at the moment of one’s initial glimpse of truth. Our mental constructs usually continue to crumble for some time after awakening. That is, if you allow it—if you see that the crumbling of mind and our world is what the truth of being is seeking to accomplish. We can’t see things in their true nature until we stop seeing things in their untrue nature.

To be fully awakened on the level of mind is a very deep thing. More often than not, when I encounter people who have had some authentic awakening, I find that, to some degree, their minds have co-opted what they’ve realized and turned it into another mental formulation. This will, of course, cause the direct realization to slip through their fingers. Sooner or later we find out that we cannot conceptualize the truth. When we realize that, the mind becomes a tool. The mind becomes useful for something other than thought. There emerges the possibility that mind and thought and even speech can originate from a different place. What is then using the mind is Being. Thought can arise from silence; speech can arise from silence; communication can arise from silence—from a place far beyond the mind. And then the mind is used as a tool, as a device to communicate, to point, to orient. But it always remains transparent to itself; it never fixates and creates a new belief or ideology.

Awakening at the Level of the Heart

The word heart refers to our whole emotional system, our whole emotional body. To be awake on the level of emotion, first and foremost, means to no longer be deriving a sense of self from how and what we feel. If we feel good, if we feel bad, if we feel healthy, if we feel sick, if we feel awake, if we feel tired—we are no longer finding and deriving a sense of self through what we experience, through what we feel.

Usually, someone’s sense of self is linked to and enmeshed with what they feel. So if we say to ourselves, “I feel angry,” or “I am angry,” what we are really saying is that at this moment my sense of self has fused with the emotion of anger. And, of course, that fusion is an illusion, because what we are cannot be defined by an emotion that runs through the body.

Awakening on the level of emotion means that we start to see and understand that what we feel does not tell us who and what we are. It tells us what we feel, period. What we feel doesn’t need to be avoided or denied, but it doesn’t define us. When we are no longer defining self on the level of emotion, our sense of self is liberated from the level of emotion, from the conflicted feelings that are on the emotional level.

For most human beings it represents a revolutionary transformation to no longer be defining ourselves through what we feel. But, of course, we can’t get there by avoiding what we feel. Our emotions and our feelings are actually fantastic pointers to what is unresolved in our being, to what we may or may not have seen through. Our bodies are great truth meters; as soon as we go into an emotional sense of divisiveness—hate, envy, jealousy, greed, blame, shame, all the rest—we know we are perceiving from the state of division. These emotions that come from divisiveness are like little red flags, reminding us that we are not perceiving the true nature of things.

Emotional turmoil tells us that we have an unconscious belief that isn’t true. Our mind has packaged something—maybe it has packaged an event in the present; maybe it has packaged the past. What we know is that it has packaged an event in such a way that it is causing us turmoil.

The emotional body is a fantastic way to enter into anything and everything that needs to be seen. It is an entry point into any illusion, anything that causes a sense of separation. If we are unstable emotionally—if we can be knocked out of emotional balance very easily—then it’s vital we start to look at our emotional lives. I don’t mean to imply that we need to analyze our emotions or take a therapeutic approach—that may be necessary and beneficial for some people, but that’s not what I am talking about here. I am talking about dealing with the emotional body at a more fundamental level. I’m talking about inquiring into the nature of fear, the nature of anger. When we feel an emotional contraction, what is that contraction about?

Most of our emotions—especially so-called negative emotions—can be traced back to anger, fear, and judgment. These three are generated when we believe our thoughts. Our emotional life and our intellectual life are not actually separate; they are one thing. Our emotional life reveals our unconscious intellectual life. We react emotionally to thoughts that we often don’t even know we’re having; in that way, those unconscious thoughts are made manifest.

Often people will come to me with some particular emotion that is troubling them—it may be fear, anger, resentment, jealousy, anything. I tell them that if they want to release it, they have to get at the underlying worldview of the feeling. What would the emotion say if it could speak? What belief patterns does it have? What is it judging?

What I’m really asking is how this person is being drawn into an emotional state of division. As I’ve said, we are set up to experience negative emotion any time we are perceiving from a state of division. Our emotional life is a clear and dependable indicator of when we are perceiving things from division. Whenever we go into division, there is some level of emotional conflict that we can feel, which can function as a call to attention. As soon as one feels emotional conflict, the questions that should be asked are: “In what way am I going into division? At this moment, what’s causing this sense of separation, isolation, or protectiveness? What is it that I’m believing? What assumptions have I made that are being reproduced in my body and made manifest as emotion?”

In this way emotion and thought are linked; they are two manifestations of the same thing. They cannot be separated. Often when people come to me with a negative emotion, I ask them to identify the thought behind that emotion or feeling. Sometimes people insist there isn’t a thought behind the emotion. In that case, I suggest they just sit with the emotion, meditate on it. If the emotion could speak, what would it say?

Time and time again, once people have worked with a difficult feeling for a day, two days, or a week, they have this sort of “aha!” They say to me, “Adya, I really believed that there was no thought attached to my emotion. I thought it was simply fear or anger or resentment. But actually, as I got really deep into it and I got really quiet, all of a sudden I could start to hear the story. I could hear the thoughts that were creating the emotion.”

Once they are able to find the thoughts that are generating their emotions, they can start the inquiry into what the thought is, exactly, and whether it’s true. Because, of course, no thought that causes division is true.

This is shocking. All of us grew up in a world where certain negative emotions were thought to be justified. The feeling of being a victim is a good example. We say, “Well such and such happened to me, so-and-so did something to me, and therefore I am a victim.” We can construct a whole intellectual and emotional life around the belief that we are justified in being a victim. But when we look at this, we see that this is just a means by which we go into separation. Reality doesn’t see things in terms of victims. It sees things from a totally different perspective. We may think, “So-and-so shouldn’t have said that to me.” But the reality is that they did. As soon as the mind says something shouldn’t have happened, we experience internal division. It is immediate. Why do we experience division? Because we are in an argument with reality.

This much is assured: if we argue with reality, for any reason, we will go into division. That is just the way it works. Reality is simply what is. As soon as we have anything in us that judges it, that condemns it, that says it shouldn’t be, we will feel division.

Most of us are taught that to go into division about certain things is natural. We’re taught that we would be deluding ourselves if we didn’t go into division about certain things, about our own suffering or somebody else’s. It’s as if we wouldn’t really be a feeling person if we didn’t internally experience a certain divisiveness, given particular events.

But this is one of the surprising and even shocking parts of coming into the deeper realms of realization: we realize there isn’t a justified reason to argue with reality, because we’ll never win the fight. Arguing with reality is a sure way to suffer, a perfect prescription for suffering.

Worse still, we find that we’re tied to whatever it is that we’re arguing with. Whether it happened thirty years ago or yesterday morning, if we argue with it, we’re trapped by it. We are reexperiencing the same pain over and over and over. Arguing with something doesn’t help us get beyond it; it doesn’t help us deal with it. It actually imprisons us; it ties us to whatever it is we’re arguing with.

It is surprising indeed to realize that none of our arguments with what is, or with what was, have any basis in truth. Our arguments are just part of the dream state. Now, to say they’re part of the dream state or to hear someone else say it is not enough. Each of us has to look for ourselves; each of us has to look into our own emotional life to bring into awareness anything that has the power to cause us to experience division. We need to look at our emotions and see them for what they are; we need to question their truthfulness, to meditate on them in silence, and to let the deeper truths reveal themselves.

As I said, this isn’t necessarily an analytical process. True inquiry is experiential. We aren’t seeking to stop something from happening, for true inquiry has no goal other than truth itself. It’s not trying to heal us or to stop us from feeling unpleasant feelings. Inquiry can’t be motivated solely by a desire not to suffer. The impulse not to suffer is understandable, but there is something else that must accompany genuine inquiry, which is the desire and the willingness to see what is true, to see how we ourselves are putting ourselves into conflict.

Once we realize that it is you and I who put ourselves into conflict—that nobody and no situation in our life has the power to do it—we see that our emotional life is a portal. It offers an invitation to look deeply, to look from the awakened state—a state that is not trying to change or alter anything, but is itself a lover of truth.

It might be easy to misinterpret what I’m saying to mean that all negative emotions are indications of division. This is not what I mean to imply. One can be sad without feeling divided. One can feel grief without being divided. One can feel a certain amount of anger without being divided. In our western culture we don’t have much context for this idea. In the East, however, there are whole litanies of wrathful deities; in the Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu traditions, for example, the personifications of God and the Divine are not always sitting on a lotus in heaven smiling beatifically. In these traditions, as in others around the world, spirituality is inclusive of a vast array of human emotional experience. Thus one should not conclude that the presence of negative emotions—or what we call negative emotions—is an indication of illusion. The key is whether or not the emotion is being derived from divisiveness. If it is, then the emotion is based on an illusion. If you inquire sincerely and discover that an emotion is not derived from divisiveness, then it is not based on illusion. Seeing this opens us up to having a wide range of emotions. We open up, becoming a big space in which the winds of different emotions can travel through our system. The freedom I am talking about, then, is the freedom from emotions that are derived from division.

How Do Emotions Hold Together the Illusion of the Separate Self?

If we look deeply, we see that fear is the linchpin that holds our emotional sense of self intact. So why are we so afraid? Because we have this idea of who we are that is limited and separate. We have an image of ourselves as somebody who can be hurt or damaged or offended.

We have to see, through our own investigation, that this sense of self, this sense of separateness, is an illusion. It’s not true. It’s a little lie we tell ourselves. It is that little conclusion—that I am the person I imagine myself to be—that opens us up to fear. Because that person we imagine ourselves to be also imagines that it can be hurt at any moment, that illusory sense of self sees life as very dangerous. Someone can come up and say an unkind word, and the illusory sense of self can immediately go into conflict and pain and suffering. We feel insecure because our sense of self can be harmed so easily.

Our sense of being a separate self is derived from a mixing of thought and feeling. The majority of our emotions are derived from what we think. Below the neck, our body is a duplicating machine for what our mind thinks. The body and mind are connected; they’re two sides of one coin. We feel what we think. When we have an emotion, what we’re actually experiencing is a thought. The thought itself is often not conscious. The amazing thing about the way we’re hooked up is that our feeling center, our heart center, duplicates thought into feeling; it transforms concepts into very real, alive, felt sensations.

When I talk about the level of mind and the level of heart, it may sound like I’m talking about two different things. I’m actually speaking of one phenomena: body and mind, feeling and emotion, two sides of one coin.

As we start to wake up from the fixations and identifications at the level of mind and the level of emotion, we come to see that there isn’t someone to be hurt; there isn’t anyone or anything to be threatened by life. In truth, we are life itself. When we see and perceive that we are the totality of life, we are no longer afraid of it; we no longer feel afraid of birth, life, and death. But until we see that, we will see life as intimidating, as a barrier we somehow have to get through.

Awakening on the level of emotion frees us from these fear-based fixations. When we begin to awaken at this level, we are free to sense the world in a deeper way; a whole different potential becomes available to us. The emotional body, the whole heart-centered area, is capable of incredible sensitivity. It is the sense organ of the unmanifest. It is that through which the unmanifest senses itself, experiences itself, and knows itself. This is very different from a concept of “me” sensing itself and finding itself through emotion and feeling. The more awake we are, the more we are able to experience the whole body-mind as a literal sensing instrument of the absolute, unified self.

In a manner of speaking, the more we awaken from the emotional body, the more the emotional body itself awakens. It opens. The less conflicted we are in our emotions, the more open our emotional body becomes. This is because the more we realize there’s nothing to protect—that all the thoughts and ideas and beliefs that cause us to go into emotional protection are false—the more open we become.

Awakening at this level is very much an opening of the spiritual heart. Perhaps you’ve seen the depictions of Christ in which he is literally reaching in, pulling the skin of his chest open, and revealing a beautiful, radiant, glowing heart. This is one depiction of the opening of the spiritual heart. An awakened being is a tremendously emotionally available being—someone who is not defending himself or herself on the emotional level or the intellectual level. Part of what happens when we awaken at the level of the heart is that we experience ourselves in an ultimate sense to be totally unguarded. When we are unguarded, what naturally flows out of us is love—unconditional love.

The ultimate nature of reality is indiscriminate; reality is what is. The truest sign of an awakened heart is that it is an indiscriminate lover of what is. This means it loves everything, because it sees everything as itself. This is the birth of unconditional love. Once this unconditional love starts to open within us, it is the way in which reality expresses itself. Reality being in love with itself happens through the awakened heart. It’s not a personal thing. It is reality, an indiscriminate lover, in love with itself. It loves everything and everybody. It loves even those who, from a personality level, you may not love. It is amazing when you start to realize that you love things and events and people you don’t love on a personality level. You realize it doesn’t matter. When the truth is awakened, it loves everything; it loves the people that your personality likes and it loves the people that your personality doesn’t like. The awakened heart loves the world as it is, not just as it could be. The more we awaken at this level, the more we experience unconditional love, which is one of the deepest callings of human life.

Awakening at the Level of the Gut

The third type of awakening is awakening at the level of the gut. The level of the gut is our most existential sense of self. It’s that part of ourselves where there is a core type of grasping—a grasping at our root. It’s like having a fist in the middle of your gut; it is our most rudimentary sense of self. It is that which grasps and contracts. It is that grasping and contracting around which all the other senses of self are constructed.

When Spirit or consciousness comes into form, into manifestation, initially it is experienced as a shock. This sudden movement from unlimited potential into the limited experience of form is shocking to consciousness itself. This grasping in the gut is that contraction, that shock, experienced at the physical level.

To get a sense of what I am describing, imagine that you are being born. You are coming out of a totally protected, warm, nurturing environment, and all of a sudden you’re in a room. It’s much colder than where you came from; there are glaring lights and loud voices. Somebody is grabbing at you, pulling on you. This is your first introduction to life itself, life outside the womb. If you can imagine that, it’s easy to see how that little baby could get a clench in the gut. It’s so violent, so sudden, and so unexpected that it can create this sort of grasping.

In addition to that initial shock of coming into form, we have many experiences that reinforce a grasping in the gut throughout our lives. Whether in childhood or during the growing up process, most of us have experiences that cause us to clamp down in fear and shock from time to time. These experiences exacerbate that grasping at the level of the gut.

How do we meet that grasping? How do we deal with it? Ultimately, we have to meet the fear of that grasping, because that’s what the grasping is—just a fear response. It’s as if you have a fist holding on in your gut, and it’s yelling out, “No, no, no, no, no! No to life, no to death, no to being, no to not being! No, no, no! I will grasp! I will hold on! I will not let go!”

Even the movement toward awakening itself can, at times, generate fear. As people get closer to awakening, it is common for them to experience fear—because awakening is the sudden releasing of this grasping in the gut. There’s no guarantee that the grasping will stay released; it may grab hold again. But initially, awakening is the release of this holding. As people are coming close to awakening, they commonly experience an intuitive sense of clutching and holding on even more tightly, as if one is going to be destroyed or killed. It is an irrational fear that arises through the system.

When people tell me they are having this kind of experience, the first thing I tell them is that it’s common, that almost everybody has this experience at some point. “It’s not a problem,” I say. “You’re just now becoming conscious of a grasping that you may not have been conscious of before.”

At this point, a common question is, “How do I get rid of it?” This question is coming from the perspective of egoic consciousness. Egoic consciousness always wants to get rid of what’s not comfortable. But, of course, whatever you try to get rid of, you tend to sustain. The very act of trying to get rid of something sustains it. By trying to get rid of something, you’re unconsciously granting it reality. You must perceive it to be real if you’re trying to get rid of it, so that unconscious granting of reality adds energy to the very thing you’re trying to get rid of. This type of clenching can’t be solved through a technique. In one sense, the awareness that there is nothing you can do is the most important realization you can have.

Asking, “What should I do?” is a veiled way of saying, “How do I control this situation?” The only antidote for this kind of willfulness is to let it go. How does one let go of willfulness? Well, it becomes very tricky, because even one’s effort to let go of willfulness is itself a willful act.

Probably everyone has had the experience of trying to let go or trying to surrender. But trying and surrendering are mutually exclusive concepts. As long as we’re trying, there is no letting go.

So there comes a point where all technique vanishes, where anything that we’ve learned about how to readjust consciousness into a clearer state will fail us. Our techniques will be of no use. There will come a point in time when we will have to realize that there’s nothing “I” can do to let go at the existential level; there’s nothing “I” can do in order to surrender. Yet surrender and letting go are absolutely what is called for.

At that point, the most important thing is to let this fact in—that there’s nothing the “I” or the “me” can do. Fully letting that in, being fully penetrated by that awareness, is itself the final letting go; it is itself the opening of the fist, the opening of the most existential, rudimentary sense of self.

In order for that to happen, it must be seen that there is no way you can do it. You must come to the end of the line; you must come to the end of your rope. Only then can spontaneous surrender happen. The only thing we can do as human beings is to see that all holding on is futile; all holding on is a veiled form of rejecting who and what we really are.

When you surrender the grasping at the level of the gut, it may feel like you are going to die. But you don’t die; the illusion of a separate self dies. Still, it may feel like you are going to die. Only when you are willing to die for the sake of truth can that grasping truly and authentically let go.

Before I go further with this, I want to add something that may apply to some people. There are some people who have had extraordinarily difficult times in their lives—who have experienced traumatic events that may have caused an even deeper grasping at this root level of being. For these people, the grasping at the level of the gut may be reinforced as they come closer to a deeper stage of consciousness. If this is the case for you, it is important not to force anything. You may need specialized help to deal with this aspect of awakening; it may be necessary to find some way to address the deeper sense of trauma you are experiencing before you will be able to let it go. If this is the case, I recommend finding somebody who truly knows how to deal with such experiences, how to meet them in a useful way. You will know that the approach this person is offering is useful because it will start working. This root level of grasping will start to let go.

Of course, growing up is traumatic to some degree for all of us. Even if you had a wonderful upbringing, the most lovely parents, and the most wonderful environment in the world, there’s no getting away without experiencing some level of trauma. Life itself is traumatic in one sense; it is traumatic to a sense of separate self. Life itself is a threat to the sense of a separate self. There’s no getting away from it.

Awakening at the level of the gut requires facing and releasing our deepest existential fear. It also requires facing and releasing what I call personal will, or the part of us that says, “This is what I want and the way I want it to be.” Ultimately, the personal will is an illusion, which is why it is so frustrating when we try to use it to control and dictate events. But illusion or not, it must be faced and dealt with. This task calls for the deepest surrender, the deepest devotion and sincerity to truth itself.

True realization, true enlightenment, comes through a complete relinquishing of personal will—a complete letting go. Of course, this often generates fear in our illusory sense of self, which can only interpret the letting go of personal will as traumatic. We fear letting go will open us up to danger. We think that if we let go of personal will, we’ll never get what we want, the world will never be the way we want it to be, and nothing will ever happen the way we want it to happen.

What we ultimately see is that these conclusions are themselves just thoughts. There is no such thing as a personal will, actually, but until we see that, the experience of willfulness is something we must engage.

This is where we start to encounter the wisdom of being disillusioned. When we feel disillusioned with something, it means we’re coming to the end of our willfulness. It’s only by coming to the end of our willfulness that transformation happens.

Those who have been addicted to drugs or alcohol and have recovered know that a very important component in recovery is coming to the end of your personal will. You realize that you can’t change your addiction through willfulness; your will is not that strong, and you can’t do it on your own. When an addict “bottoms out,” what this really means is that his or her personal will has broken down. And when our personal will has broken down, a whole different force comes rushing into our system. It’s the force of Spirit, and it can now become operational, because we are no longer avoiding it through grasping at personal will.

All of us, in our own process of awakening, will visit the limitation of our personal will. Most of us will visit it several different times, on deeper and deeper levels, until it is fully extinguished.

The loss of personal will isn’t really a loss at all. It’s not as if we become the doormat of humanity, that we stop knowing what to do or how to do it. Quite the opposite happens. By surrendering the illusion of the personal will, a whole different state of consciousness is born in us; a rebirth happens. It’s almost like a resurrection happens from deep within us. This resurrection is very hard to explain, like many things in spirituality, but in essence we start to be moved by the completeness and totality of life itself.

The depiction of this kind of movement is very vivid in the Taoist tradition, which focuses on the expression of the Tao, or the truth, through us. If you read through the Tao Te Ching or look at some of the Taoist teachings, you start to get a feel for how willfulness is replaced by a sense of flow.

When you get out of the driver’s seat, you find that life can drive itself, that actually life has always been driving itself. When you get out of the driver’s seat, it can drive itself so much easier—it can flow in ways you never imagined. Life becomes almost magical. The illusion of the “me” is no longer in the way. Life begins to flow, and you never know where it will take you.

As their sense of personal will diminishes, people often say to me, “I don’t even know how to make a decision anymore.” This is because they are operating less and less from a personal point of view. There is a new way of operating, and it is not really about making this decision or that decision, the right decision or the wrong decision. It is more like navigating a flow. You feel where events are moving, and you feel for the right thing to do. It’s like a river that knows which way to turn around a rock—to the left or to the right. It’s an intuitive and innate sense of knowing.

This kind of flow is always available to us, but most of us are too lost in the complexities of our thinking to feel that there’s a simple and natural flow to life. But underneath the turmoil of thought and emotion, and underneath the grasping of the personal will, there is indeed a flow. There is a simple movement of life.

One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment comes from a Jesuit priest named Anthony de Mello, who passed away some years ago. Someone asked him to define his experience of enlightenment. He said, “Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable.” I love that, because it defines enlightenment not just as a realization, but as an activity. Enlightenment is when everything within us is in cooperation with the flow of life itself, with the inevitable.

When we’re not so conflicted and divided inside, we get a feel for the inevitable—where life is moving, what direction it is going in. We no longer ask, “Is this the right way? How do I know it’s the right or wrong way?” This kind of question actually distorts our perception. There’s something much more subtle occurring; it’s the flow of life itself.

As we surrender our willfulness—as we meet the fear in the gut and find the sincere willingness to say yes to whatever we’re afraid of—everything that I’m speaking about becomes available for us. When we say a simple and sincere yes to life, yes to death, yes to the ego’s own dissolving, we don’t have to struggle anymore. It becomes a new way of navigating through life. Flow is what navigates us through life—not concepts, not ideas, not what we should or shouldn’t do, not what’s right or wrong. Over time, what we come to see is that flow is always amazing. It is the expression of unity, it directs our existence in ways that are healing and loving, and it bring things together in ways we couldn’t imagine.