Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself.
AdyashantiRead
Awareness isn’t something we own; awareness isn’t something we possess. Awareness is actually what we are.
Interpretation
Awareness is intrinsic to our nature rather than a trait we can possess.
In this quote, Adyashanti suggests that true awareness is an essential aspect of our being, not merely a quality that can be acquired or owned like a possession. This perspective emphasizes that awareness is fundamental to our identity and existence, rather than an external attribute we seek to control or acquire.
In practice
During a meditation workshop, you may use this quote to emphasize the importance of recognizing one's own awareness.
Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself.
If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.
The willingness to not bypass illusion is very important. We come to nirvana by way of samsara. We come to see the true nature of things by seeing through the illusory nature of things. We don't come to nirvana by avoiding samsara. We don't come to clarity by avoiding confusion.
Our illusions-the beliefs we hold on to-are the very doorways to our freedom. We simply have to enter through them without grasping or pushing away. We must not believe them, but we must not run away from them either. We need to see each moment of apparent bondage as an invitation to freedom. Then it becomes an act of love, an act of compassion, to stop running away.
Let go of all ideas and images in your mind, they come and go and aren’t even generated by you. So why pay so much attention to your imagination when reality is for the realizing right now?
The joke of it all is that you are looking from your true nature right now without knowing it. If you would stop being fascinated with the contents of your mind, you would experience what I am saying. Feel your way into what I am saying rather than thinking about it. Only a self-concept looks and longs for God. Drop your self-concept and there is only God meeting God. Enlightenment is the restoration of cosmic humor.
Every baby born_x000D_ unloved, unwanted, is a bill that will come_x000D_ due in twenty years with interest, an anger_x000D_ that must find a target, a pain that will_x000D_ beget pain. A decade downstream a child_x000D_ screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,_x000D_ a firing squad is summoned, a button_x000D_ is pushed and the world burns.
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
The sense of being a separate, egoic self begins with the astral, not with the physical, body. The soul is individualized spirit.
I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.
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