The following is adapted from a lecture by Adyashanti, called The Awakened Life / Attending To Freedom. It can be found in Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.
It’s very much in line with the concept of my next (and hopefully final) album, which deals with Buddhism, loss, retirement, and death. The end of the story.
I transcribed my favorite parts of the lecture and edited them for readability.
It’s organized into four little sections:
1 – How Do We Know What We Value?
2 – I Am Not Conscious, I Am Conscious(ness)
3 – The Costume Called You
4 – How Much of Myself Is Necessary?
• • •
How Do We Know What We Value?
There’s thinking… and then there’s this totally natural state of awareness — a silence and stillness.
And we can pay attention to it.
Why don’t we usually do that for very long? Very simple reason.
We might pay attention to it for a moment, a minute, maybe five minutes, who knows. The mind will come in and say, this may not solve all my problems if I just sit here listening to this silence.
How do I know if I will end up enlightened? Where is my guarantee? How do I know what job to take? When am I gonna find my soulmate? How do I get rid of the person I thought was my soulmate?
*laughs*
Your mind is very good at coming up with something very important to think about, isn’t it? And it’s very compelling.
There’s always an amazing imperative of something I must solve. I must think about it!
It says: no, you can’t leave me alone for very long. You must stay in my domain. You must keep solving problems… figuring things out. Otherwise, maybe nothing will happen.
I can stop thinking for maybe for a moment, but not for much longer than that… before I have to quickly ask myself: did that 30 seconds in silence help me? Did it solve my problem?
And usually the answer that you come up with:
No, it didn’t solve my problem.
So that’s why most people don’t give silence much time or attention.
In life, that’s how we show what we value.
We may say we value all sorts of things, but if you ever wanna know what you actually value, just look at what you gave the most time to.
Pretty simple, isn’t it? You see how little time and attention we actually give to that inner simplicity of stillness and silence.
I’m not saying how much time every day do you actually spend meditating? What I mean is, how much do we actually give attention to that inner stillness, whether we’re meditating or not?
All you really have to do is give attention back to that still silent awareness. If you give attention to it fully, 100%, even for a moment… a moment is enough for there to be a shift in your perception.
It’s not like it takes years and years and years and years and years and years of practice. It doesn’t. That’s a myth.
The funny thing is that awakening itself doesn’t take time. It takes you to step outside of time… outside of what may happen tomorrow.
You put all of your attention right here, right now. You put all your attention into this awareness, this consciousness that is present. It’s looking out through your being, looking out through your eyes in this very instant.
I Am Not Conscious, I Am Conscious(ness)
In spirituality, a lot of people are looking for a very strange place of consciousness, an altered state of consciousness. A weird, wild state of consciousness.
But awakening is not really about an altered state of consciousness. Everybody’s already in an altered state of consciousness. I think that’s relatively obvious. The “normal” state of human consciousness is a state of insanity. It’s altered to the hilt!
Actually, the consciousness that’s being spoken of in spirituality is not an altered state of consciousness. It’s consciousness as… it… is.
That is, looking through your eyes, hearing through your ears, registering all the feelings and senses and perceptions. THAT consciousness is the consciousness that we speak about when we speak about your true nature.
Everybody in this room is conscious at this moment. But most people don’t know that they ARE conscious(ness).
They think consciousness is something that happens to them. Or something that they possess, or something that they are doing.
Not something that they actually are.
That’s the shift that happens.
By giving your attention to consciousness. Giving your attention, not your thoughts.
Not trying to figure out what it is. That’s not necessary. Giving your attention is all you have to do.
And then from that attention, the question: what am I really?
You don’t make that shift happen. It just happens.
All of a sudden, there’s that realization… oh, this consciousness, this awareness, this presence, this stillness… is what I am.
It’s not something I’m looking into, or trying to grasp.
It’s actually the essence of one’s being.
That shift does not take time. If you’ve practiced for 50 years, you’ve got no better advantage than someone who may have walked in here for the very first time.
The only things that are important are:
1 – Do I actually wanna know? Do I really want to know the reality of what we are? Of what I am, what you are, what all of us are? Do I really wanna know the underlying reality of me more than anything else?
2 – Will I put all of my attention on that consciousness?
That’s all that matters. That’s the beauty of it. That’s how egalitarian it is.
The Costume Called You
If you just put your awareness on and notice the presence of awareness itself, the shift will happen. You don’t have to worry about it. In fact, the less you worry about it, the easier it is for the shift to happen.
Just put your attention on that consciousness. It’s already present. That’s all you do.
That’s the consciousness that has been living in and through and around that costume called you.
Every time you look in the mirror, that’s the costume consciousness wears.
When this shift of consciousness happens, consciousness just returns to itself, and then you realize this thing I formally called “me” is just this costume.
You don’t lose the costume. You won’t wake up and look any different in the morning.
Spiritual awakening is, in one sense… You come to that experiential knowing of what you are. Then you realize you kind of always knew it all along. But you didn’t really allow yourself to fully know it, because there is very little affirmation of our true nature.
In life, everything’s about the costume. Make it look perfect, make it do this, make it successful. Make it worthy, get your parents who died 10 years ago to finally realize that the costume was good after all.
When I started to teach, I realized something that was very striking: almost everybody I met, probably nine out of ten people, was still in some way trying to prove their existence to their parents. Amazing, huh? I don’t mean people who were like 20 years old. I mean, 50, 60, 70-year-olds still trying to get the approval of their parents. Or to get their parents to understand, or maybe just to get even.
But at the core of it, there is that identification with the exterior. And as soon as you identify with the ego, the ego is always deficient.
Ever notice, even if egos succeed… some egos get wealthy. Some egos find wonderful mates, some egos, believe it or not, have a pretty good life.
But even when they do, they’re still trying to succeed. If I get a $1 million house… then the next thing, they’re gonna be looking for a $2 million house. And then they’re gonna look for a $3 million house.
So there’s always a sort of deficiency when we’re identified with the exterior.
To any extent you’re identified with the exterior, it’s always looking for completion, satisfaction. Looking for acceptance, looking for love.
Why is it doing that? Because it’s inherently deficient.
It’s hollow. It’s all exterior. When you look inside the exterior, there’s nothing in there. There’s nobody in there.
Some people who have looked inside their ego structure and seen there’s nobody there… there’s nothing there. There’s no self in myself!
They might go into a sort of cataclysmic depression. Oh, God, that means I’m really not worthy because I’m not even there! What could be worse than that? Something must’ve gone horribly wrong! Everybody else seems to have done a very good job at finding their self, and maintaining their self, and being a really good self — but I haven’t! I’ve looked into mine, and it’s come up as a big zero.
By the way, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad shell or a wrong shell. It’s just an empty shell.
It’s like putting on a Halloween costume, and you wear it for a couple of hours at a party… and somehow you all of a sudden identified with the costume entirely.
So if someone comes up to you and says, “You know, Superman’s actually better than that Batman costume you’re wearing!” You get all upset: “Batman is better than Superman!”
You may feel awful. “You don’t like me!”
That’s what happens if you identify with the costume.
It happens all the time. You have a suit, you put on a pair of pants… it’s just a human costume. “How do I look, honey?”
The high school boys and girls in the bathroom at the mirror… hair this way, that way, this way, that way. They come back, and it’s green or purple or black. Looking for the right costume.
So there’s a possibility of seeing that, within the costume that one’s wearing, this exterior shell of ego, that there isn’t a better costume inside of it.
There’s no interior ego. There’s only exterior ego.
Everybody knows they are not the person they present to others.
You know you’re not the person you present to the world.
We are only taught to think of ourselves in terms of self.
But when you really look inside, and you see maybe I’m not this thing called myself. Because that’s just a shell, there can be a shift of consciousness.
It’s a great relaxation, and a great freedom of realizing that you are not this thing called yourself.
Spirituality is nothing more than seeing that I am not me — and then the dissolving away of self.
I did not necessarily mean the dissolving of your personality. Your costume can still be there. You just realize there’s no self in it. So it’s not like the costume of you gets torn up or thrown away.
Then, the costume you wear is then very light. It doesn’t really matter.
I remember years ago, I read this book about this lady who came to this discovery I’m talking about.
No one told her how to do it. She didn’t have a sort of formal way about this. But just as she got into her later years of life, she started to ask herself, how much of myself is necessary?
Beautiful question.
How Much Of Myself Is Necessary?
Ultimately, what you see is:
The whole project of “me” isn’t necessary. It’s not necessary for existence, or to know how to move in life, or to be happy, or to fall in love.
It’s not actually necessary for anything other than suffering, confusion, anxiety, guilt, shame, envy, judgment, and blaming. The things the ego loves.
Do you remember in your life when you thought that your view on things was actually, really necessary?
Do you remember that… or do you still actually believe that? *laughs*
Like, I need to be the banner for my beliefs?
I didn’t go around thinking that way, necessarily. It’s a hidden thought within every ego structure.
Like, if everybody just thought the way I did, things would go a lot better.
Nobody says it out loud, right?
In many ways, if you look at the ego structure and meditate upon it, you see how unnecessary it is.
It’s not bad. It’s not wrong. It’s just not necessary.
It doesn’t give what it promises to give.
It doesn’t give world peace, happiness, or freedom.
When you start to see these things more naturally, your attention will come out of the incessant inner dialogue. You’ll start to value a quality of stillness and quiet.
Let your experience be rooted in that. Not in the concepts, not in the words, and not even in this talk. But that which they come from, that to which they point to:
That inner freedom.