More on Truth

by Spencer Barron

A talk by Adyashanti:

I want to start out here by sharing a story with you. Some years ago I was on the island of Maui and I was giving a talk and I was talking about truth and I was more specifically talking about how the truth really manifests in the context of life after awakening.  And what I was saying was what would it be like if we didn’t avoid anything we knew to be true. What if we came out of hiding in all areas of our life, what if we stopped avoiding ourselves completely because that literally is the awakened life.

And so I was talking along these lines and the evening went by and there was questions and then the evening ended, and then the next day there was another meeting and someone raised their hand, a gentleman, an older gentleman in his mid life, fifties or sixties, raised his hand and he said something really beautiful, he said ‘I was listening to your talk last night about truthfulness and really being honest, and a willingness to really face ones self as they are and not hide in some past realisation. And he said somehow it penetrated and I went home.

Me and my wife went home’ – his wife had also come to the meetings with me – and he talked about them going home and he said ‘we had been on the edge of divorce for quite some time now and we went home after we heard you talk and we just sat down and we started to tell each other the truth, we started to tell each other what was true for ourselves, and he said it wasn’t like when we used to tell each other the truth, which would be more like trying to convince each other of the truth or trying to pretend that one of us is right and one of us is wrong, he said this was telling the truth which was just very simple, it was almost like confessing exactly what we had been experiencing but we had been experiencing for a long time, confessing the fact that we felt separate from each other and distant from each other and confessing some of the secrets they had kept from each other, which were obviously causing them to feel separate and isolated from each other. And he said we actually just sat there and told each other the truth, he would tell truth and then he would allow his wife to tell truth, and then he would tell truth and allow her to tell truth and he said it wasn’t that we were working anything out or trying to come to conclusions, we simply were coming out of hiding and he said we literally talked from eleven o’clock at night until three o’clock in the morning, which he said was also the reason why he was blurry eyed and tired at the moment. But he related to me that it was the most extraordinary evening of his entire life – just that evening of telling truth, not asserting truth but not denying truth, just simply telling truth in a very sincere way, coming completely out of hiding. And I found over the years of working with people, people who had very deep and profound awakenings, that in many people, most people there is really a fear in them from really being truthful, really being honest not only with others but with themselves, and of course the core of this fear of being truthful and honest and real as a human being, is that intuitively and in most people unconsciously, we all know that if we’re actually totally truthful and totally sincere and honest, that at that moment we can’t control anybody, we cant control somebody we’ve been truthful with, we can’t control somebody we’ve told what seems to be true to, we can only control people if we tell half truths, if we shade what’s true, but if we tell the total truth then our inside is on the outside, there’s nothing hidden inside. For most human beings to have their inside exposed on the outside brings up incredible fear, most people walk around feeling like ‘my god if anybody could look inside of me, if anybody could see what was happening inside of me, what I thought inside of me, what my fears were, and also my doubts were, and also what my truths were, what I really perceived’, most people are terrified that if somebody could do that they would just feel horrified. So most people are actually protecting themselves, they’re holding a lot of things in, they’re not actually living really honest and truthful and sincere lives, because if they were to do so they would have no control, of course they don’t have control anyway, but they would have no illusion of control. And so this man and this woman, they both told me about how extraordinary this evening was and they said ‘you know to be quite honest, we don’t know if we’ll stay together or not stay together’ and of course it’s been many years now and they are still together but at the time they didn’t know if they would be together, but they even had the honesty to say that, they had the honesty to know that they had just made a beginning by telling each other the truth, by being honest, by being real. Most people, most people don’t get out of childhood, much less their adolescence, without many times and having many experiences of telling truth and being wounded for telling truth or having someone say you can’t say that or you shouldn’t say that or that wasn’t appropriate, the situation wasn’t appropriate. So most of us human beings have a very deep underlying conditioning that says just to be who we are is not ok, that there are times to be truthful and honest and there are times not to be truthful and honest, most human beings actually have an imprinting not only in their minds but in their bodies and their emotions, that if they’re real, if they’re honest, something bad is going to happen, somebody’s not going to like them and they won’t be able to control their environment if they tell the truth. But this is an aspect of awakening, it may not seem like it because it’s very human, it’s very practical, it’s not transcendent, it’s not about pure consciousness but it is about how pure consciousness manifests as a human being in an undivided way and this is part of the process, the phase of awakening is that, what we realise must be able to be manifest and we also have to come to grips and start to notice the very forces within us that keep us from manifesting this.

Now one of the dangers when I talk about telling the truth to oneself and others, is inevitably, almost every time I’ve given a talk like this in public, at some later point in time, maybe the next day or the next week, someone will come up to me and say ‘you know Adya, you know that talk you gave on truthfulness and honesty and all that and I go, yeah I remember the talk, and they’ll say, well you know somebody came up to me in the parking lot afterwards and decided that they needed to tell me all the rotten things they thought about me in the name of honesty,’ and I just kind of shake my head and go oh my god, I hesitate to even give talks on this because it’s so easy to misunderstand. Truth is a very high standard, it’s not a play thing, to tell what’s true within ourselves, isn’t to tell what we think, it’s not to tell our opinion, it’s not to dump our sort of, the garbage can of our mind on to somebody else, this is what I think about you, this is what I feel about you this is my judgement about you, none of that’s true, that’s illusion, that’s distortion, that’s one own garbage, it’s ones own problem, it’s one’s projection. What is truth? Truth isn’t to unload our opinions on to someone, that’s not truth, truth isn’t to tell our beliefs about things, that’s not truth, those are ways that we actually hide from truth. Truth is much more intimate than that. Whenever we tell the truth it has much more of the sense of a confession, I don’t mean the confession of something bad or wrong, I mean the sense where we come completely out of hiding, truth is a simple thing, to speak the truth is to speak from a sense of total and absolute unprotectiveness and to do that with any consistency, we have to not only have met every place in ourselves that is afraid of doing that, we have to see what is the belief structure I have that tells me I can’t do that, because those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality, but just to know that is not enough, you have to actually see it, really perceive exactly what one believes, what are the exact belief structures that cause you to go in to duality, that cause you to go in to conflict and hiding.

And also part of awakening, part of realising the inherent freedom of being, if it’s true and authentic, if it’s real, it’s given to the whole world, it’s given to everybody, true freedom isn’t ‘I’m free’ true freedom is everything is free, which means everybody has the freedom to be who they are, whether they are awake or not awake, deluded or undeluded. Freedom is that everything and everybody gets to be exactly as they are. Unless we’ve come to that point, unless we’ve seen that that is how reality sees things, then we’re actually withholding freedom from the world, we’re seeing it as a possession, we’re only concerned with ourselves, how good I can feel, how free I can feel, but true freedom it’s a gift to everything and everybody. As the Buddha said upon on his awakening ‘I and all beings everywhere have simultaneously realised liberation.’ Now come from the conventional mind that’s impossible to understand, if everything woke up, someone may say, then why am I not awake? If the Buddha’s correct, that the whole world woke up when he woke up, then why am I not awake? I can’t really explain that to the conventional mind. What Buddha was communicating was it wasn’t the Buddha that woke up, it wasn’t this person that woke up, it was the totality, it was the reality that woke up, and then was expressing that awakening through this being called the Buddha. But one of the important things about that is allowing the whole world to wake up, part of allowing the whole world to wake up, is the whole world is free, everybody s free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you’ve given the freedom to each and everybody to like you or not like to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently, until you’ve given the whole world it’s freedom then you’ll never have your freedom. This is a very important part of awakening, it’s an easy part to miss, again if we were fully awake it would be impossible to miss this, but most people don’t fully awaken, initially, all at once. This is very important though, everybody gets to be as they are, and only when everyone is allowed to be as they are when you’ve given them that freedom, when you’ve given them the freedom that they already possess, do you find within yourself the capacity to simply be honest and real and true, coz we can’t be true as long as we’re expecting or wanting others to agree, that will cause us to contract ‘maybe they won’t like what I say, maybe they won’t agree, maybe they won’t like me, this will, this is all ways that we withhold freedom for everybody else. So when we’re protecting ourselves we’re also withholding freedom for everybody else, but if one was to look into the very nature of the realisation itself, when reality awakens to itself, when we realise that we are the one and only spirit that manifests as everything and everyone, in the very nature of that realisation itself is total freedom for all.

And there’s a certain fearlessness about it, people sometimes come to me and they say ‘well Adya there’s still some inner place – often a very sort of early childhood place -that’s afraid to just be what I know to be true.’ And of course I’ll say well you have to look at that, see what beliefs got formed, see how you yourself formed certain belief structures based on what happened until you see that those belief structures aren’t really true, but first you’ve got to see them as they are. But also you have to see that you and I, we have no way of knowing or predicting how the world will receive us, part of being awake is being willing to be crucified, I mean if we think to be awake is for the whole world to agree with us we are actually in a total delusion, Jesus found that out, a totally awake being, as they say in Christianity the Son of God, and what happened to the Son of God well he got crucified, hung on a cross, and inside human consciousness there is this sort of deep sense of a taboo, as if it’s not ok to realise the truth of being and if you realise it, it’s not ok really to – to just be it – not go out preaching about it necessarily, I’m not suggesting that, not shoving it down someone’s throat, but just being what you perceive, there’s a unconscious taboo within the totality of human consciousness that says ‘that’s not ok, you’ll be crucified for it, you’ll be killed for it’ and of course in our human history people have been killed for it, people have been crucified for it. We have a long history of getting rid of or killing the truly enlightened beings in many societies because true enlightenment does not conform to the dream state, in fact many times the dream state feels offended and threatened by true enlightenment, because a truly enlightened being cannot be controlled, the threat of death can’t even control an enlightened being, the threat of death couldn’t control Jesus, he was going to live his life out as he was destined to live it out, whether that meant life or death for him. And so as a human being we can’t have these childish ideas that enlightenment means everybody loves me, maybe everybody will love you but more likely some will and some wont. But when you’ve given the whole world it’s freedom, to like or not like, then you’ve gone a long way to finding your own freedom, they’re tied inextricably, one to the other.

And besides the most important thing, is not that we try to convince anybody of the truth that we see, that’s not so important, what’s really important is, are you being truthful with yourself? If you can be truthful with yourself you can be truthful with anybody and everybody, so there’s no real usefulness on becoming overly focused on being truthful with the world and everybody else, although that’s necessary. To start with can you be totally sincere with yourself? Can you go to that place which is beyond blame, beyond judgement, beyond should and shouldn’t, can you go to that place which is so sincere that you won’t shy away from any part of yourself that’s still in conflict, that you won’t use the perception of truth to hide from something that’s less than liberating. The question is really a question of sincerity, it’s discovering that sincerity, as I’ve said it’s not a self improvement programme, once you’ve discovered this level of sincerity, this level of honesty you find that sincerity and honesty are manifestations of the absolute nature of being. And to be this sincere with oneself may not initially be easy, we may see things about our selves that we really don’t want to see, we may see the parts of ourselves that stand in seeming stark contrast to everything we’ve realised, to our own awakening, but nonetheless awakening itself, that’s where it moves, it moves toward and in to that that is non awake and the sincerity is the key, it’s what allows it to happen and it does happen if you’re sincere, if your really real with yourself and this phase of awakening of coming completely out of hiding, seeing every point of fixation, every way you go in to division, then this part of the journey continues and opens up and as it opens up you feel your heart opening and your mind opening, you feel yourself opening on levels that you never really dream possible, levels as a human being not just transcendent of humanness but also right within your humanness, because there is no separation between your human being and divine being. The great Zen master Huang Po had said ‘that you are no greater for being a Buddha and you are no less for being manifest as a human being’. What he was saying was they’re not separate, they’re not different, for although we awaken from the dream state and we awaken from the illusion of simply being a human being, still there will be a return, as it were, until we see that human nature and divine nature are one nature, one being, one expression, one truth and sincerity is the key. We have to be willing, we have to want to see everything, and when you want to see everything, you will see everything.