On this blog, I spend a lot of time talking about the process of awakening. The steps and things we experience on the journey home. Even the means. However, it’s important to remind that awakening is not actually a process. It is an instant moment of surrender, a profound letting go. For most of us, there are several such key releases on the journey as we move through the apparent stages of awakening.
As I get further into Adyashanti’s recent book Falling into Grace, there are increasingly good parts. He brings up there being no process later in the book and compares awakening with death. Adya relates the profound surrender that can take place with a physical death and how that can dramatically accelerate spiritual progress. I’ve known people who have made major leaps on their death bed. However, we would rather surrender sooner and enjoy some of the lived experienced of awakening.
Awakening takes no time. It is just an instant. What can take the time is becoming ready to surrender or let go deeply enough for that instant to occur.
But this doesn’t mean there’s something we’re not doing right. Nobody knows how to “stop” as Adya puts it. “Nobody knows how to awaken“. He asks we just let it fully in that we don’t know how. Let go that sense that we’re doing something to awaken. Then we may find ourselves stopping. It is only a matter of how deeply you let go that determines if you have a moment of rest or an awakening. That’s how simple it is. That’s all it is.
It isn’t something you do. It is a moment of pure non-doing. Of surrendering to just be.
It can be easier to do with a teacher or others awake because they’ve done this. They embody it, making it easier to mirror. This is also why as more people awaken it becomes ever easier for others.
Let go, even of doing something to let go. 😉
Davidya
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Hi Davidya,
Great pointing…. Seems to be coming up more and more these days.
Unmani does a nice job of summing it up in this video “Losing it all and waking up to realty.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LcNwv1JAMs&feature=digest_thu
Hi Ben
You raise an interesting point (nudge nudge), though perhaps unintentionally. What Unmani is talking about is a little different than I talk about. She’d probably object to all the concepts here.
She describes the importance of recognizing you don’t know and surrendering to not knowing. This is what worked for her.
For me, I see and experience reality as knowable. Thus, I do not feel the need to surrender knowing, I only need to surrender the old ideas of what I conceive myself/universe to be.
This becomes much easier with experience of That as there is some sense of what you’re surrendering too. However, surrendering must still be discovered. Once we do it a few times, we get the hang of it; though at major shift points, what needs to be surrendered changes. It’s also a little individual due to variations in what we hold on to.
As usual, it’s the same process but experienced differently by different people.
Thanks, Ben
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