I shared this thread on another forum a few years back, and I figured it might be of use to the members of this forum, so figured I'd reshare it here. It's a summary of a chapter in Adyashanti's book 'The End of Your World,' in which he talks about awakening on the level of mind, heart, and gut, and it's something that really resonated with me. A lot of these concepts will be familiar to many of you, I'm sure, but it's a conceptual framework that I've found really useful in my own development, so I wanted to share his teaching on the subject. 

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Awakening on the level of mind

He begins by saying that 'most of our minds are in great conflict, caught between the polarities of good and bad, worthy and unworthy, holy and unholy, and so on.' What awakening reveals on the level of mind, however, is that thought is ultimately illusory. Not that it isn't an extremely useful tool, but the issue is that very often we look to thought to provide answers for which the mind isn't equipped to answer, and that we look to thought for a sense of self. And through our minds, we construct a virtual reality which we mistake for actual reality.  As we begin to awaken, we see that thought itself is empty of reality; 'at best, it is symbolic'. As we awaken on the level of mind, we recognise that our perception of the world holds no intrinsic reality, that we aren't the person we imagine ourselves to be. 'What is destroyed,' he says, 'is our entire worldview... [Enlightenment] is the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true, from ourselves to the world'. He ends by saying that often, when people have these realisations, their minds have turned the realisation into a mental formulation, but ultimately the truth cannot be conceptualised. And when we realise this, the mind can operate in a much more useful way, never fixating and creating new beliefs or ideologies.


Awakening on the level of heart

To awaken at the level of heart, he says, is to no longer derive a sense of self from what we're feeling, whether we're feeling good, bad, worthy, unworthy, lovable, unlovable – whatever it is that we're feeling. Emotion does not tell us what we are; 'it tells us what we feel – period'. Whilst we aren't defined by what we feel, we also can't deny what we feel either, if we truly want to be free: 'Our emotions and our feelings are fantastic pointers to what is unresolved in our being, to what we may or may not have seen through'. And so, in order for us to resolve any emotional issues we may have, it's necessary for us to inquire into the nature of fear, anger, sadness, etc., and to get to the root of these feelings. If we don't get to root of them, they'll surface again and again. Our emotional life and our intellectual life are not, he says, actually separate; when we experience these feelings, there is an underlying worldview of the feeling, of which we are often quite unaware, but which we must make conscious in order to resolve the feeling. Sometimes it can be difficult to uncover the underlying worldview, and people might even insist that there isn't one, but if we're persistent and we're honest with ourselves, sooner or later we'll perceive a worldview. And if we're to be free, no assumption can be left unexamined or unquestioned, and we need to recognise when we're arguing with what is, because when we argue with reality, internally we become divided, and we suffer – and we're trapped by our own non-acceptance, regardless of whether or not we believe it to be justified. At this point he stresses that not all negative emotions (or, at least, what we might label negative emotions) are indications of division; it's possible to feel grief, sorrow, even a certain amount of anger, without being divided. It's up to us to discern whether or not an emotion is or isn't causing us to be divided, is or isn't the result of an argument with what is. It's fear, he says, that holds together our emotional sense of self, and at the root of this fear is a belief in ourselves as separate from the world, as tiny fragments in an enormous universe. This makes us feel very threatened, which can cause us to become defensive and emotionally closed off. As we awaken, however, we realise that this is sense of separation is an illusion, that there is nothing to protect, and we become more emotionally open and available. 'And,' he says, 'when we're unguarded, what naturally flows out of us is love – unconditional love […] The awakened heart loves the world as it is, not just as it could be'.


Awakening on the level of gut

It is in our gut that our most existential sense of self is located, where there is a core type of grasping. When spirit is birthed into form, it is experienced as a shock; right at the moment that we're born, we're exposed to the trauma of life outside of the warm, nurturing environment of the womb. Then, as we get older, we experience subsequent traumas that cause us to clamp down in fear and shock, and cause further grasping at the level of the gut: '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!”' Initially, awakening is the release of this holding; just prior to awakening, this holding actually often becomes more pronounced, as the seeker begins to sense the truth of their being beyond the self-image they had taken themselves to be, and as they become acutely conscious of a grasping that had previously been unconscious. Our instinct is generally to try and rid ourselves of uncomfortable feelings and sensations, but of course our efforts are doomed to failure, and often serve only to worsen the discomfort; 'In one sense, the awareness that there is nothing you can do is the most important realisation you can have'. We can try to surrender, but the very act of trying is itself an act of non-surrender. So the best thing you can do is to really let sink in this awareness that you're powerless to do anything about it. At this point he's careful to point out that people who have experienced significant and profound trauma in their lives may experience an especially traumatic grasping in the gut, and that they might need to seek specialised help in order to resolve these traumas. But even if we've had a relatively comfortable and happy life, life itself will still be perceived as a threat to the sense of a separate self (life itself will be regarded as something exterior, when of course it's what we are). So awakening at the level of the gut requires that we face and release our deepest existential fear. Also, he says, 'true realisation, true enlightenment, comes through a complete relinquishment of personal will – a complete letting go'. To our illusory sense of self, this feels dangerous – we fear that letting go will leave us vulnerable to danger, and we fear that we won't get what we want, that nothing will be the way we want it to be. So it's necessary for us to recognise that personal will is an illusion and for us to come to the end of our willfulness, to recognise its futility. We fear that we won't know what to do and that we'll be exploited if we surrender our personal will, but when we've reached that point, we begin to see that life can take care of itself, that in fact it's always taking care of itself, and there's seen to be a magical quality to it. When we're lost in the complexities of our thinking, we become unconscious of the effortless flow of life, but it's operating all the time, regardless. He quotes the definition of Enlightenment of the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello: 'Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable'; when we cooperate with life, then we flow with life. When we meet the fear in the gut, with sincerity and openness, when we say 'yes' to life, we don't have to struggle anymore; flow is what navigates us through life.