The Mystical Man

https://youtu.be/2lK0x4DeYDc "The deepest form of prayer is the art of listening to the silence of God." - Adyashanti "It's amazing what happens if we sit down in our quiet for long enough." "We all learn the most from who the people in our lives are. We can't fake who we actually are."

Why?

"When we really don't know, then we know exactly what we need to know at every second we need to know it." "As unspiritual as this sounds, it comes from the outside, not from the inside. I don't have a vision. Someone says, 'Do you want to go here?' 'Okay.'"

Very insightful interview. Adya at his best: "We're not doing a good job of an inner journey, if we're excluding exterior life. What it means to exist in the world today is an important part of the inner journey. It's where the rubber hits the road. It's the world that keeps holding up a mirror in front of us, saying: 'How are you interacting with this?'" "Even if we haven't come upon the unified vision, there are lower and higher aspects of our egoic nature. Our egos have the capacity for compassion, empathy, openness, and understanding. Life is always calling us to act from the best within us." "Transformation is a bloody, messy process. When you're living out spiritual transformation, it doesn't look spiritual at times." "Change is chaotic. It's chaotic until we reach a certain level of consciousness, and then it no longer has to be chaotic anymore, because we're willing to see truths." "Part of the process is seeing things that we don't want to see. There's a love affair with whatever consciousness reveals to us." "Spirituality is about accelerating a process that's natural, but the spiritually inclined person is doing things to accelerate a process dramatically. When we accelerate a developmental process dramatically, the road is bumpy." "We abdicate our lives, when we abdicate our true higher nature. We get lost in trivial things. Or we abdicate it by hiding in spiritual viewpoints." "Autonomy, on any level, is hard-won. It requires a lot of standing up in your own two shoes and taking responsibility for whatever your vision is. Go out there and engage it, whatever that happens to be." "What do you know that you really don't want to know? That's what you're being asked to pay attention to now. That's what you're being asked to respond to. That's what you're being asked to come out of hiding behind." "The models don't hold the answers. It's the people, it's the quality of interaction, how we're being with ourselves, how we're being with each other. That's something that each of us brings to the table." "What are you going to do when you go to the grocery store, and there are no short lines? When you find out what your authentic response on that level is, then you let that level mirror back to you what's really going on inside. The big stuff has a way of solving itself. The clarity on the big stuff comes." "Everyone and everything around you are experiencing your state of consciousness, where you're coming from, what you feel, what you think. It's being registered. You're a radio broadcaster for who you are." "After a transforming insight, ego comes back, and people experience the equal and opposite. As open and expanded you become, you become equally contracted and dark for a while. We have our own unique conditioning that arises in the wake of that." "It's not about heaven. It's not about hell. It's about what's true. Don't grasp at the light. Don't push away the dark. There is something that's neither of those; includes them both but is not identifiable as either one of them." "What we do to ourselves, we tend to do to others. If we're stuck in a place where we're always judging and condemning ourselves, if that's the state of mind we're always in about ourselves, we're putting that energy out to the people around us, too." "You see God in everything, from the best to the worst. At a little deeper level, it's not just seeing the divine in everything, it's seeing the divine as everything, as everything, and everything includes everything. When it becomes really deep in you, nothing can occur that changes that knowing, that view. You can experience something that's really difficult, it's still not going to alter that view." "The emotional byproducts have nothing to do with the truth that's seen. The emotions will fade as the truth becomes normalized." "Women will often see the divinity of existence, whereas men will see the non-existence of existence. Women will often see that God is immanent, whereas men will see that God is transcended. As our vision fills out, it fills out beyond our genders. We see the other side, and it becomes a whole view."

Interesting website: The Truths of Life - Know The Absolute - Guide to Enlightenment

No problem. I enjoyed her Tweet.

Listen to the other interview with Adya:

"Ego as function has something to do with self-awareness. Ego evolves out of becoming self-aware. Part of that function is our ability to differentiate; that's part of wisdom. We're using the differentiating aspect of ego to see through ego, not just in our minds, we feel all this stuff, too." "Meditation as an orientation of being that sometimes I practice in a seated way." "What would it be like for me to have the next conversation I have if I was having the next conversation from that quiet place? Being the quiet place and letting it talk." "Spirituality is just another word for life." "Spirituality when it's honest, when it's connected with you and your life, it's to live in a state of discovery all the time." "Acknowledgement and appreciation of awareness." "Intuitively connect with the presence that they are."

Listen to the other interview with Adya:

I'm watching both the show and the documentary at the moment:

Force and Counterforce. The reason why people like Gandhi and MLK made a difference is because they embodied true Power.

This trial...

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/10/13/us/parkland-trial-verdict

It's never that simple. There are always aggravating and mitigating factors. The jury recommended life in prison because of Cruz's upbringing and his mental illness.

What problem?

I wanted to share this here, because it's really good: "Once, at a retreat where I was teaching, a woman came up to the microphone and said, “I feel such immense rage inside me! Even as I’m sitting here at this retreat, where I’m not being disturbed and not being challenged, I just feel so much rage! I look at people, and find myself judging them and being resentful of them for no reason whatsoever. A lot of my life, I’ve walked around feeling really, really angry.” I could see in her eyes and in the way she held her body that these emotions of rage and anger had really taken over her whole system. What I said was, “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to your rage.” At first, she looked at me kind of perplexed. She didn’t know what I meant, so I said it again. I said, “I want to speak to the emotion of rage. Tell me how it views life, what it thinks about others. What are its judgments about the most significant people in your life?” She looked at me with a sense of horror, and she said, “Oh, no! Not that!” I said, “Yes, yes, yes. That’s what I want to talk to. I want you to give rage a voice. Stop holding yourself as separate from it, stop trying to get rid of it. Just for a moment, let your mind become a reflection of it.” Fortunately, she had great courage. Because she had suffered so much, she was willing to take a chance, and so she started to speak to me from the emotion of rage. What spilled out were all of her toxic thoughts and ideas, all the ways her mind had formed conclusions about life and the people in her life, many of which were based on some very difficult moments in her upbringing. As I kept encouraging her by saying, “Yes!” and “Tell me more!” and “Tell me more!” she became more and more willing to let this voice of rage speak. As she did, all of the judgment, blaming, and condemning came out of her. Then, after she spoke in this way for a while, a softer voice began to emerge. It was the voice of deep hurt and sorrow. It was a more intimate, less guarded voice. She was literally giving voice to her pain and suffering. And as she did, I began to see exactly why she was suffering so much. ALLOW YOUR SUFFERING TO SPEAK Our suffering consists of two components: a mental component and an emotional component. We usually think of these two aspects as separate, but in fact, when we’re in deep states of suffering, we’re usually so overwhelmed by the experience of emotion that we forget and become unconscious of the story in our minds that is creating and maintaining it. So one of the most vital steps in addressing our suffering and moving beyond it is first to summon the courage and willingness to truly experience what we’re feeling and to no longer try to edit what we feel. In order to really allow ourselves to stay with the depth of our emotions, we must cease judging ourselves for whatever comes up. I invite you to set some time aside—perhaps a half an hour—to allow yourself simply to feel whatever is there: to let any sensation, feeling, or emotion come up without trying to avoid or “solve” it. Simply let whatever is there arise. Get in touch with the kinesthetic feeling of it, of what these experiences are like when you’re not trying to push or explain them away. Just experience the raw energy of the emotion or sensation. You might notice it in your heart or your solar plexus, or in your gut. See if you can identify where the tightness is in your body—not only where the emotion is, but what parts of your body feel rigid. It could be your neck or shoulders or it might be your back. Suffering manifests as emotion—often as deep, painful emotion—and also as tension throughout the body. Suffering also manifests as certain patterns of circular thinking. Once you touch a particular emotion, allow yourself to begin to hear the voice of suffering. To do this, you cannot stand outside the suffering, trying to explain or solve it; you must really sink into the pain, even relax into the suffering so that you can allow the suffering to speak. Many of us have a great hesitancy to do this, because when suffering speaks, it often has a very shocking voice. It can be quite vicious. This kind of voice is something that most people do not want to believe they have inside them, and yet to move beyond suffering it’s vital that we allow ourselves to experience the totality of it. It’s important that we open all the emotions and all of the thoughts in order to fully experience what is there. When you notice some emotional hurt within you, allow your mind to speak to you, inside your head. Or you might even speak out loud. Often I’ll suggest to people that they write down what the voice of their suffering says. Try to keep it as short as possible, so that each sentence is contained in and of itself. For example, the voice of suffering might say something like, “I hate the world!” “The world is never fair!” “I never got what I wanted!” “My mother never gave me the love I needed!” and so on. Often, if it’s all kept in your head, it just turns into a big muddle. So the first step in releasing this muddle is to speak or write these voices of suffering. What you’re looking for is how your suffering, how the particular emotion you are experiencing, actually views your life, views what happened, and views what’s happening now. To do this, you need to get in touch with the story of your suffering. It is through these stories that we maintain our suffering, so we need to speak or write these stories down—even if the stories sound outrageously judgmental or blaming or condemning. If we allow these stories to live underground, in the unconscious mind, all the painful emotions will continue to regenerate. So now take a moment to allow a piece of your suffering to tell its story. First, name the emotion, then let it speak. What does this emotion think of you? What does it think of others, of your friends, your family? What does it hate most? Why does it appear in any given day? What is underneath these emotions? Let your suffering tell its entire story." Excerpted from Adyashanti’s book, Falling into Grace, 2011. I think this is basically what Spiritual Autolysis is.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63237092

Yeah, people act like the death sentence is the worst sentence, but if you really want to punish someone, lock him up for the rest of his life. He gets to live, but he lost his freedom. Losing your freedom is worse than losing your life. Life in prison is the ultimate death sentence.